A scenario-customizable and visual-rendering simulator for on-vehicle vibration energy harvesting

The rising demand for renewable energy supply in standalone computing devices has led to the emergence of vibration energy harvesting (VEH) to overcome technical and environmental challenges. For instance, VEH is desirable in IoT scenarios where maintaining a battery supply is non-sustainable or impractical due to many devices or remote circumstances. VEH can be environmentally friendly given that it reduces the reliance on traditional battery production and usage, thus reducing the carbon footprint and chemical waste in disposable batteries. However, a significant hurdle in VEH adoption is the lack of effective simulation tools for generating various application scenarios to describe, validate, or predict the efficacy of the VEH-based devices. It is necessary for designing and implementing a VEH simulator for a variety of realistic application scenarios. Being the first of its kind, this study presents a scenario-customizable and visual-rendering VEH simulation system based on the Unity3D Engine. The proposed simulator features a modular design that consists of several key functional components including vibration scenarios’ creation and manipulation, VEH model specification, Unity-Python Co-computing mechanism, and 3D visualization. This paper also presents two AI-based case studies leveraging the functionality and data provided by the simulator to demonstrate its potential for data-driven research and applications. • Vibrational energy harvesting greatly depends on largely random environmental variations. • A Unity3D-based energy harvesting environment and device simulator is developed to capture the environmental randomness. • AI-based vibrational energy harvesting prediction is made possible by data generated and collected from such simulator.