Power generation from microfluidic drops using inorganic silicon dioxide electret film

Abstract

This work proposes a microfluidic structure utilising its damping motion for energy harvesting based on a microfabricated electret silicon oxide (SiO 2 ). When the device was subjected to an instantaneous acceleration, the power was generated due to the variable shape of the microfluidic on the electret SiO 2 film. The damped wave phenomena came from the variable shape of microfluidic which oscillated back and forth due to inertial forces. With a larger acceleration on the device, the peak value of a short-circuit current ( I sc ) and an open-circuit voltage ( V oc ) were increasing as a function of linear equation and quadratic equation, respectively. The microfluidic energy harvester reached up to 3 nA of I sc and 0.18 V of V oc with an acceleration 4 m/s 2 , respectively. Moreover, with a microdrop with dimension 15 mm 3 on the inorganic SiO 2 film, the work demonstrated that the device can obtain V oc of 0.3 V and I sc of 3 nA with a sliding angle ~30°, which showed further applications for an angle sensing.