This paper addresses the problem of piezoelectric conversion enhancement from mechanical to electrical energy and illustrates this improvement on specific applications. Considering a mechanical structure equipped with piezoelements bonded on its surface, it can be shown a non-linear processing of the piezoelement output voltage improves significantly the energy conversion. This non-linear processing simply corresponds to short circuit the voltage for a very brief period of time when the voltage is maximum or minimum. This processing results in the generation  of a dry-friction type of mechanical dissipative force that appears to be very efficient to pump out mechanical energy or to convert it to electrical energy. Several self-powered wireless applications (vibration control, energy harvesting on vibrations, structural health monitoring) will be presented. Theoretical aspects of the processing will be developed and experimental results on the applications previously mentioned will be given for narrow-band and random vibrations.

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