RAILMON project dedicated to energy harvesting systems
France Innovation has published a great press release on the RAILMON project. As part of the consortium, CEDRAT TECHNOLOGIES has developed a robust, scalable and versatile energy harvester for harsh environment such as railway applications. These energy harvesters combine an advanced nonlinear electromechanical structure with an Amplified Piezoelectric Actuators (APA®) from CTEC. Although initially designed for actuation, APA transducers are particularly well suited for energy recovery, due to their robustness and good electromechanical characteristics (high coupling factor). This APA® is associated to a patented bistable structure in order to increase the bandwidth of the harvester. It is expected that Energy harvesting systems have a huge impact on the proliferation of IoT where human accessibility is limited.