Electrostatic vibration energy harvester with combined effect of electrical nonlinearities and mechanical impact
- 28 February 2014
- journal article
- conference paper
- Published by IOP Publishing in Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering
Abstract
This paper presents an advanced study including the design, characterization and theoretical analysis of a capacitive vibration energy harvester. Although based on a resonant electromechanical device, it is intended for operation in a wide frequency band due to the combination of stop-end effects and a strong biasing electrical field. The electrostatic transducer has an interdigited comb geometry with in-plane motion, and is obtained through a simple batch process using two masks. A continuous conditioning circuit is used for the characterization of the transducer. A nonlinear model of the coupled system 'transduce-conditioning circuit' is presented and analyzed employing two different semi-analytical techniques together with precise numerical modelling. Experimental results are in good agreement with results obtained from numerical modelling. With the 1 g amplitude of harmonic external acceleration at atmospheric pressure, the system transducer-conditioning circuit has a half-power bandwidth of more than 30% and converts more than 2 mu W of the power of input mechanical vibrations over the range of 140 and 160 Hz. The harvester has also been characterized under stochastic noise-like input vibrations.This publication has 28 references indexed in Scilit:
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