Energy harvesting is playing an increasingly important role in supplying power to monitoring and automation systems such as structural health monitoring using wireless sensor networks. This importance is most notable when the structures to be monitored are in rural, hazardous, or limited access environments such as busy highway bridges where traffic would be greatly disrupted during maintenance, inspection, or battery replacement. This thesis provides an overview of energy harvesting technologies and details the design, prototyping, testing, and simulation of an energy harvester which converts the vibrations of steel highway bridges into stored electrical energy through the use of a translational electromagnetic generator, to power a wireless sensor network for bridge structural health monitoring. An analysis of bridge vibrations, the use of nonlinear and linear harvester compliance, resonant frequency tuning, and bandwidth widening to maximize the energy harvested is presented. The design approach follows broad and focused background research, functional analysis, broad and focused concept generation and selection, early prototyping, parametric modeling and simulation, rapid prototyping with selective laser sintering, and laboratory testing with replicated bridge vibration. The key outcomes of the work are: a breadth of conceptual designs, extensive literature review, a prototype which harvests an average of 80µW under bridge vibration, a prototype which provides quick assembly, mounting and tuning, and the conclusion that a linear harvester out performs a nonlinear harvester with stiffening magnetic compliance for aperiodic vibrations such as those from highway bridges. / text

Ces travaux s'inscrivent dans la problématique de l'alimentation autonome de systèmes électroniques communicants fondée sur la récupération de l'énergie disponible dans l'environnement humain. Cette thèse traite du dimensionnement d'un générateur multisource (thermique, photovoltaïque et cinétique) avec stockage d'énergie. Afin d'optimiser le dimensionnement d'un tel système dans un contexte de ressources paramétrables, des modèles génériques, adaptés à une large plage de dimensions, ont été établis, à partir de technologies déjà existantes, et validés expérimentalement. L'approche système a permis d'étudier les nombreux couplages multiphysiques existants et de mieux dimensionner le système. Ainsi, il a été montré qu'optimiser le rendement global de toute la chaîne de conversion d'énergie conduit à des solutions différentes de celles résultant d'une optimisation du dimensionnement de chaque organe pris séparément. Enfin, dans la dernière partie de cette thèse, une étude a été menée sur l'impact du profil de consommation sur le dimensionnement du système. Cette étude a permis, sur le cas particulier d'une application réelle, de mettre en évidence le potentiel d'une gestion d'énergie en cas de ressources faibles notamment par l'adaptation des profils de consommation. / This work deals with the problematic of self-powered communicating electronic systems based onenergy harvesting in the human environment. This thesis addresses the sizing of a multisource generator(thermal, photovoltaic and kinetic) with energy storage. To optimize the sizing of such a systemin the context of configurable resources, generic models, adapted to a wide range of dimensions, wereestablished from existing technology, and validated experimentally. The system-level approach wasused to study the many existing multiphysics couplings to better size the system. Thus, it was shownthat optimizing the global efficiency of the whole energy conversion chain leads to solutions differentfrom those resulting from sizing optimization of each component separately. Finally, in the latter partof this thesis, a study was conducted on the impact of load profil on the sizing of the system. Thisstudy, on the particular case of a real application, highlight the potential for energy management inthe case of poor ressources, notably by adapting the load profils.