Design and optimization of an electrostatic micro-harvester for sensors applications

This paper presents a novel design, modeling and optimization of an electrostatic micro energy scavenger using the environmental vibration energy on systems like aircraft fuselage or wings. The design incorporates MEMS comb-drive in-plane overlap and in-plane gap closing topologies into one structure to realize an optimized electrostatic capacitive vibration energy harvester. A novel surface micromachining technology in conjunction with UV-LIGA process is used to fabricate the prototype. The dynamic modeling and optimization is carried out in MATLAB to determine the best device geometry and dimensions for maximum power output. Simulation of the optimized vibration-to-electric microconverter demonstrated a power density of 534.25 W/m³ with external acceleration magnitude of 9.8 m/s² at a vibration frequency of 1500 Hz.