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The purpose of this paper is to describe an electro-mechanical lumped parameters model used for the simulation of an energy harvester device.

The model is taking into account the main features of both mechanical and electromagnetic phenomena keeping the computational burden as low as possible to insert it inside an optimisation loop.

The simulation tool is then used to design the main parameters of an energy harvester able to supply a computer mouse by converting mechanical energy provided by the computer user.

The use of a multi-physics analysis tool inside one optimisation loop is a difficult task that requires the honing of all the modules involved in the performance evaluation. The developed approach has shown to be reliable, efficient and has been a key factor in the development of a new product.

Supplying remote wireless sensors is not an easy task if the site where the device is located is not easily accessible. In order to obtain direct measurements of the road-vehicle interactions, sensors must be placed inside the tyre environment thus a power supply must be available for their working there without any wire connection with the car main power. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

An electro-mechanical energy harvester has thus been developed for supplying an automotive wireless sensor of pressure, temperature and acceleration to be placed on the inner line of a tyre. The primary energy source is the vibrations or variable accelerations imposed to the device and induced in the tyre by the wheeling.

The harvester has been designed by means of a multi-physics optimisation based on an integrated electromagnetic-mechanical circuit simulator. Thus an automated optimisation of the device with respect to volume constraints, magnets dimensions, induction coils placement and size have been performed to increase the average power extracted from the device at different wheeling speeds.

The use of the multi-physics environment together with automated optimisation technique has been tested for the first time on the electromagnetic harvester structure.