Piezoelectric Beams, Magnets and Stoppers as Fundamental Blocks for Transducers and Autonomous Sensors

This paper reports the development of a family of devices that are all based on fundamental blocks compose of: piezo electric beams, magnets, and mechanical stoppers that act as electric contacts. We have implemented combination of the proposed building blocks in order to realize devices for harvesting kinetic energy from weak and wide spectrum sources. It is worth noting that a proper use of these blocks has been also exploited to demonstrate the realization of devices which can be used as voltage rectifiers and multiplication circuits.