Abstract
The common vibration energy harvester effectively converts mechanical vibration to electric power at a specific resonance frequency that must match the ambient excitation frequency. The resonance frequencies of energy harvesters are fixed during the design process and could not be changed after fabrication. In this paper, we proposed the new frequency tuning which uses the rotatable spring in order to adjust the spring constants. By this tuning method, the resonance frequency of the system can simply be manipulated using spring rotation. The proposed energy harvester has been successfully tuned to a resonance frequency between 23 and 32 Hz. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed energy harvester could generate a maximum output power of $60{\mu}W$ with an acceleration of 0.5 g ($1g=9.81m/s^2$), and that the resonance frequency of the harvester was able to tune approximately 31.4%. When the proposed harvester was attached to an automobile engine, the maximum open circuit voltage of 1.78 Vpp was produced at 700 rpm.
