Power Harvesting towards Sustainable Energy Technology through Ambient Vibrations and Capacitive Transducers

Abstract

As part of the fourth industrial revolution, low-power electronic devices require a power harvesting system to provide energy for their operation because energy harvesting technologies are crucial for enabling 90% of wireless sensor networks. While solar and thermal energy harvesting are popular methods, they have limitations such as dependence on sunlight and thermal gradients, which make them unreliable for low-wattage electronic equipment and wireless sensing networks. Power harvesting from ambient vibrations can lead to a sustainable system. Currently, there is a focus on different power harvesting principles such as electromagnetic, piezoelectric, and electrostatic. This research work presents a novel power harvester design that uses three in-plane capacitive transducers - gap-closing, overlap-varying, and pattern-varying - to operate under ambient vibrations as input energy. With low levels of input vibrations, the device moves, leading to changes in capacitance and the harvesting of reliable electrical power. The design analysis includes capacitance, frequency, and electromechanical evaluations to acquire capacitance matrices, natural frequencies for different modes, displacement covered by moving mass, charge distribution, and pressure distribution.