Design and optimization of a small-scale linear electromagnetic energy harvester

Abstract

This paper presents the energy harvesting using an electromagnetic energy conversion for the linear kinetic energy harvesting in low vibration level machine. The proposed linear electromagnetic energy harvester is composed of a magnet slot and moving coils for converting kinetic energy to usable electrical energy, which is able to provide enough power to small electronic devices such as wireless sensor nodes for the machine condition monitoring. In this work, the concept of design and optimization in coil size and magnet configuration by using Finite Element Method (FEM) are proposed. Its electrical characteristics are evaluated when the energy harvester is moving along a linear guide as a function of velocities in order to examine the energy harvester's performances. From the experiments, it is found that the optimized energy harvester can provide maximum power density of 110 µW/cm3 at the velocity of 175 mm/s.