This paper presents a full energy harvesting system for harvesting mechanical energy from internal combustion engines to power low power autonomous sensor systems inside of the engine to record and wirelessly transmit the piston temperatures. Due to the reciprocating movement of the pistons, sensors cannot be connected to the cars electrical system by wires and thus are usually powered by batteries. Changing those batteries is a time consuming process since large parts of the engine need to be taken apart to get to the pistons. This is the reason why we present a system that uses a piezoelectric nano generator (PENG) based on flexible PVDF to convert a small amount of the mechanical energy of the pistons to electrical energy. A power management system (PMS) including a maximum power point (MPP) circuit maximizes the power output of the harvester and supplies a regulated DC voltage to the sensor.
