A perspective on elastic metastructures for energy harvesting

Rapid advances have been made in the properties of metastructures, including phononic crystals, metamaterials, and metasurfaces, with respect to their robustness, high power density, and broadband behavior. This presents unique advantages for energy harvesting devices to meet the demands for technology upgrades in various applied science and engineering applications such as wireless sensors, MEMS, and wearable devices. We provide a systematic overview of the mechanisms underlying the above properties, considering different configurations of wave localization in elastic metastructures for energy harvesting purposes. The energy localization can result from cavity modes, topologically protected edge/cavity modes, chiral edge mode, focusing effects, among others. Finally, we give the prospects of energy harvesting metastructures such as the introduction of nonlinear design, time-modulation, machine learning inverse design, and nonlocal effects. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.

Automated summary

Rapid advances have been made in the properties of metastructures, including phononic crystals, metamaterials, and metasurfaces, with regards to their robustness, high power density, and broadband behavior. These advancements provide unique advantages for energy harvesting devices in meeting technological upgrades in various applied science and engineering applications. This article systematically provides an overview of the mechanisms underlying these properties, considering different wave localization configurations in elastic metastructures for energy harvesting purposes, and discusses future prospects for energy harvesting metastructures.