MEMS electrostatic vibration energy harvester without switches and inductive elements
Abstract
The paper is devoted to a novel study of monophase MEMS electrostatic Vibration Energy Harvester (e-VEH) with conditioning circuit based on Bennet's doubler. Unlike the majority of conditioning circuits that charge a power supply, the circuit based on Bennet's doubler is characterized by the absence of switches requiring additional control electronics, and is free from hardly compatible with batch fabrication process inductive elements. Our experiment with a 0.042 cm 3 batch fabricated MEMS e-VEH shows that a pre-charged capacitor as a power supply causes a voltage increase, followed by a saturation which was not reported before. This saturation is due to the nonlinear dynamics of the system and the electromechanical damping that is typical for MEMS. It has been found that because of that coupled behavior there exists an optimal power supply voltage at which output power is maximum. At 187 Hz / 4 g external vibrations the system is shown to charge a 12 V supply with a output power of 1.8 μW.
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