Our daily lives are constantly being enriched with a myriad of connected devices, capable of communicating with one another or monitoring our environment, using sensors run by batteries. This kind of power source is a problem since some 80 million batteries are thrown out every day!

We must therefore approach this inevitable revolution that is the Internet of Things (IoT) with a parallel transition towards more energy-autonomous devices.

It has become commonplace to use the energy generated by solar panels, But researchers are now looking add more original solutions: recovering the energy of vibrations or mechanical movements or that of electromagnetic flows. Capturing the energy that surrounds us in this way is a new path that can allow small portable devices to operate autonomously and wirelessly.

To achieve this, the entire energy recovery chain is being studied, from material optimisation to oversight of the recovery systems so they extract all the energy from their source.

The difficulty lies in working with small amounts of energy that must not be wasted. This requires a more comprehensive approach, including studying energy storage and management methods as part of a life cycle analysis.

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