Performance enhancement of an out-of-plane electret-based vibrational energy harvester with dual charged plates

• Main Authors: Tao, Kai, Lye, Sun Woh, Miao, Jian Min, Hu, Xiao
• Other Authors: School of Materials Science & Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Energy Harvesting; Vibrations (Mechanical); DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/89452; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/46253
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper presents a novel out-of-plane electret-based vibrational power generator (EVPG) that has both negative and positive charged electret plates integrated into a single seismic mass system. Compared with the conventional single-charged two-plate configuration, the proposed device not only exhibits an enhanced output voltage magnitude but also has a wide operational bandwidth due to spring softening nonlinearity according to the experimental analysis. With the acceleration changes from 0.1g to 0.5g, the operating 3-dB bandwidth can be increased 2.6 times from 2.5 Hz to 6.5 Hz, which indicates higher energy conversion efficiency than a linear energy harvester in the practical scenario of broadband random vibrations.