Investigation of Concurrent Energy Harvesting from Ambient Vibrations and Wind

In recent years, many new concepts for micro-power generation have been introduced to harness wasted energy from the environment and maintain low-power electronics including wireless sensors, data transmitters, controllers, and medical implants. Gen-erally, such systems aim to provide a cheap and compact alternative energy source for applications where battery charging or replacement is expensive, time consuming, and/or cumbersome. Within the vast field of micro-power generation, utilizing the piezoelectric effect to generate an electric potential in response to mechanical stimuli has recently flourished as a major thrust area. Based on the nature of the ambient excitation, piezoelectric energy harvesters are divided into two major categories: the first deals with harvest-ing energy from ambient vibrations; while the second focuses on harvesting energy from aerodynamic flow fields such as wind or other moving fluids. This Dissertation aims to investigate the potential of integrating both sources of excitation into a sin-gle energy harvester. To that end, the Dissertation presents reduced-order model