Environmental energy harvesting boosts self-powered sensing

Self-powered sensing technology has extremely important application value in many areas, such as health care, meteorology, internet of things, and so on. The progress of energy harvesting technology suitable for various environments is essential for the advancement of self-powered sensors. Mechanical energy has the characteristics of wide distribution, diverse forms, and dispersion. The efficient collection of environmental energy is always a difficult problem in the development of self-power supply technology. In this article, the latest research progress of mechanical energy acquisition technology, the development of self-powered sensors, the methods to improve the efficiency of energy acquisition, and the key technical problems of self-powered sensors are reviewed. Especially the latest progresses in improving the output and mechanical stability of piezoelectric, magnetoelectric, triboelectric, thermoelectric nanogenerators are discussed, including non-linear structure design, resonant tuning technology, power management circuit design, new material preparation, and hybrid energy harvesting. Finally, the application prospect and future development of self-powered sensing are discussed.