Energy Harvesting and Scavenging [Scanning the Issue]

The articles in this special issue cover recent advances in energy-harvesting and energy-scavenging systems with a focus on numerous "renewable" transducer technologies as well as emerging applications. energy-harvesting technologies are fundamental in enabling the realization of "zero-power" wireless sensors and implementing the Internet-of-Things (IoT) and machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Their increasing utilization in low-power and power-efficient sensors and electronics could potentially find application in numerous critical areas ranging from health, agricultural, structural health monitoring to logistics, localization, and security. Energy-harvesting devices, including solar panels, piezoelectric devices, thermocouples, and RF energy scavengers, can dramatically extend the operating lifetime of nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Furthermore, this technology enables a completely battery-less operation and reduces the operation cost of WSNs, which is mainly due to battery replacement, thus making it very important for a sustainable "near-perpetual" WSN operability.