Impact-based electrostatic harvesters considered as a multi-source problem
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Le, Cuong Phu; Halvorsen, Einar
- Source
- 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), 2013 IEEE International Symposium on. :2731-2734 May, 2013
- Subject
- Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Acceleration
Transducers
Capacitors
Topology
Electrostatics
Integrated circuit modeling
Energy harvesting
- Language
- ISSN
- 0271-4302
2158-1525
This paper presents a simulation study that compares two microscale impact-based electrostatic energy harvesters with multiple transducers contributing to power conversion as separate electrical sources. One harvester with rigid end-stops has two-sources and another with transducing end-stops has four sources. Each source is connected to a voltage-doubling rectifying circuit and the outputs of all rectifiers charge a common storage capacitor thus constituting a parallel passive circuit topology. The two devices are constrained to have the same total chip area and maximum displacement limit d max =10μm. Generator performance is evaluated by considering the voltage reached on a storage capacitor C=100nF within 5s. Simulation results show that the impact device with the four-source scheme yields an output energy of 50.0nJ in the impact regime, while the reference device exhibits a saturated energy of 24.5nJ.