A Hybrid Piezoelectric and Photovoltaic Energy Harvester for Power Line Monitoring

Monitoring the health of power lines (PL) is essential for ensuring reliable power delivery, facilitating predictive maintenance, and maintaining a resilient grid infrastructure. Given the extensive length of PL networks, large numbers of wireless sensor nodes must be deployed, often in remote and harsh environments where battery replacement is costly and impractical. To address these limitations, this work proposes a hybrid energy-harvesting approach that combines piezoelectric and photovoltaic (PV) technologies to enable long-term, battery-free PL monitoring. The primary energy source is a compact, tunable, magnetically coupled piezoelectric vibrational energy harvester (VEH) that exploits local magnetic field distribution, inducing mechanical excitation of a cantilever and enabling the harvesting of vibrational energy near the PL at a frequency of 50 Hz. A complementary PV harvester is integrated to ensure operation during power outages or conditions where the piezoelectric excitation is reduced, thereby enhancing system robustness. Electromechanical characterization and a lumped-parameter model show good agreement with experimental results of the proposed VEH. The system is validated both on a PL test bench (5 A–10 A) and through inertial excitation using an electrodynamic shaker, demonstrating stable performance across a wide range of operating conditions. The combined hybrid architecture highlights a promising pathway toward self-sustaining, maintenance-free sensor nodes for next-generation power line monitoring. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of using such system for powering a WSN node by comparing the power produced by the proposed system with the power consumption of a potential application.