Cantilever-based electret energy harvesters

By Sebastien Boisseau, Ghislain Despesse, Thibaud Ricart, E. Defay, A. Sylvestre. 2011

165 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Integration of structures and functions has permitted the electricity consumption of sensors, actuators and electronic devices to be reduced. Therefore, it is now possible to imagine low-consumption devices able to harvest energy from their surrounding environment. One way to proceed is to develop converters able to turn mechanical energy, such as vibrations, into electricity: this paper focuses on electrostatic converters using electrets. We develop an accurate analytical model of a simple but efficient cantilever-based electret energy harvester. We prove that with vibrations of 0.1g (∼1 m s−2), it is theoretically possible to harvest up to 30 µW per gram of mobile mass. This power corresponds to the maximum output power of a resonant energy harvester according to the model of William and Yates. Simulation results are validated by experimental measurements, raising at the same time the large impact of parasitic capacitances on the output power. Therefore, we ‘only’ managed to harvest 10 µW per gram of mobile mass, but according to our factor of merit, this is among the best results so far achieved.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Civil and Structural Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/532e20b7c72df9ba9d6825430c1769cf1aaeca6b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Biomedical Engineering

In Civil and Structural Engineering

Chengkuo Lee

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

A comprehensive study of non-linear air damping and “pull-in” effects on the electrostatic energy harvesters (2020, methodology): “In 2011, a maximum output power of 50 μW was obtained from an energy harvester with out-of-plane cantilever [26].”
Electrostatic Conversion for Vibration Energy Harvesting (2012, methodology): “This structure was also studied by Boisseau et al. [15] in 2011.”