• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.249-253
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• 2011

This paper describes the fabrication and characteristics of vibration-driven electromagnetic energy harvester without spring to use at low frequency like a human body motion. The implemented energy harvester consists of NdFeB magnets, copper coil. The optimization of induced voltage was done by the various widths of coil, number of the turns, size of fixed and moving magnets and thicknesses of the cylinder. The fabricated energy harvester is capable of producing up to 15.0 $V_{pp}$ for basic model and 28.80 $V_{pp}$ for improved model at 5.0 Hz resonance frequency and 0.75 g acceleration level. The basic model and improved model are provided a maximum power of 6.375 mWand 25.831 mW at 1 KHz of load resistance in rectifier circuit.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.458-468
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• 2016

Electromechanical model for analyzing a multimodal piezoelectric energy harvester comprising three connected beams is presented in this paper. This system consists of three beams which are connected alternately. The piezoelectric layer is only attached to the middle beam. With this special structural configuration, the first, second, and third natural frequencies are congregated so that the energy harvester can generate meaningful amount of power consistently when the main frequency component of the excitation varies around the lowest three natural frequencies of the harvester. To investigate the dynamic and electric response of the piezoelectric energy harvester, an electromechanical model is developed using the Kane's method and the accuracy of the model is validated by comparing the results obtained with the model with those obtained with the commercial software ANSYS. The results show that the piezoelectric energy harvester comprising three connected beams has much broader power generating frequency range than that of the conventional piezoelectric energy harvester.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.579-591
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• 2015

This paper investigates a magnetoelectric (ME) vibration energy harvester that can scavenge energy in arbitrary directions in a plane as well as wide working bandwidth. In this harvester, a circular cross-section cantilever rod is adopted to extract the external vibration energy due to the capability of it's free end oscillating in arbitrary in-plane directions. And permanent magnets are fixed to the free end of the cantilever rod, causing it to experience a non-linear force as it moves with respect to stationary ME transducers and magnets. The magnetically coupled cantilever rod exhibits a nonlinear and two-mode motion, and responds to vibration over a much broader frequency range than a standard cantilever. The effects of the magnetic field distribution and the magnetic force on the harvester's voltage response are investigated with the aim to obtain the optimal vibration energy harvesting performances. A prototype harvester was fabricated and experimentally tested, and the experimental results verified that the harvester can extract energy from arbitrary in-plane directions, and had maximum bandwidth of 5.5 Hz, and output power of 0.13 mW at an acceleration of 0.6 g (with $g=9.8ms^{-2}$).

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.125-128
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• 2012

This paper describes the design, simulation and characterization of an AA size electromagnetic energy harvester that is capable of converting environmental vibration into electrical energy. A magnetic spring technique is used to scavenge energy from low frequency external vibrations. The generator is characterized by ANSYS 2D finite element analysis, and optimized in terms of moving mass, fixed magnet size, coil width and load resistance. The optimized energy harvester is able to generate 53.5 mW of average power at 8.1 Hz resonance frequency, with a displacement of 0.5 mm.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.198-201
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• 2009

Due to piezoelectric property of regenerated cellulose paper, a green energy harvester using an electro-active paper (EAPap) was studied. In order to design the green energy harvester, we simulated cymbal type energy harvesting structures for single and multi-stacked layers of EAPap films. From the simulation, the optimized material orientation, thickness of harvesting structure was selected. By measuring of the induced output voltage by applying stress on energy harvester will be explained in detail. Therefore we propose the feasibility of the nature-friendly piezoelectric EAPap as a new green energy harvesting material.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.393-399
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• 2009

Historically, industrial condition monitoring has been performed by costly hard-wired sensors or infrequent checks by maintenance personnel equipped with hand held monitoring equipment. Self- powered wireless condition monitoring systems provides on-line monitoring of critical plant and machinery providing major operating cost benefits. A vibration energy harvester(VEH) is a device that converts kinetic energy occurred by machine vibration into useable electrical energy. Using VEHs to power wireless monitoring systems can yield significant benefits: increased reliability, lower life time costs and no battery disposal issues, etc. This paper proposes the novel prototype design and manufacturing of a VEH that can eliminate the effect by failed batteries.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.424-428
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• 2010

This paper describes the design and analysis of AlN piezoelectric micro energy harvester. The harvester was designed to convert ambient vibration energy to electrical power as a AlN piezoelectric material compatible with CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) process. To cut off the leakage current, AlN was used as the insulating layer. Also, Mo was used for the excellent c-axis crystal growth as the bottom electrode. The AlN harvester which it has the low operating frequency was designed by using the ANSYS FEA (finite element analysis). From the simulation results, the resonance frequency of designed model is about 360 Hz and analyzed the bending mode, displacement and expectation output.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2008.04a
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• pp.821-825
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• 2008

Requirements of wireless sensor are increasing in machine condition monitoring. But, the limitation of battery power, self-power wireless sensor is necessary for the purpose of stand-alone operation. To overcome this problem, energy harvester is developed by the vibration energy. The purpose of this study is to develop a high efficiency energy harvester with high precision tuning.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.544-544
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• 2014

Energy harvesting technology, which scavenges electric power from ambient, otherwise wasted, energy sources, has been explored to develop self-powered wireless sensors and possibly eliminate the battery replacement cost for wireless sensors. Among ambient energy sources, vibration energy can be converted into electric power through a piezoelectric energy harvester. For the last decade, although tremendous advances have been made in design methodology to maximize harvestable electric power under a given vibration condition, the research in reliability assessment to ensure durability has been stagnant due to the complicated nature of the multiple failure modes of a piezoelectric energy harvester, such as the interfacial delamination, fatigue failure, and dynamic fracture. Therefore, this study presents the first-ever system reliability analysis for multiple failure modes of a piezoelectric energy harvester using the Generalized Complementary Intersection Method (GCIM), while accounts for the energy conversion performance. The GCIM enables to decompose the probabilities of high-order joint failure events into probabilities of complementary intersection events. The electromechanically-coupled analytical model is implemented based on the Kirchhoff plate theory to analyze its output performances of a piezoelectric energy harvester. Since a durable as well as efficient design of a piezoelectric energy harvester is significantly important in sustainably utilizing self-powered electronics, we believe that technical development on system reliability analysis will have an immediate and major impact on piezoelectric energy harvesting technology.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.24 no.5
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• pp.416-421
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• 2011

Nowadays, the increasing demands upon mobile devices such as wireless sensor networks and the recent advent of low power electrical devices such as MEMS make such renewable power sources attractive. A vibration-driven MEMS lead zirconate titanate $Pb(Zr,Ti)O_3$ (PZT) cantilever device is developed for energy harvesting application. This paper presents a piezoelectric based energy harvester which is suitable for power generating from conventional vibration and has in providing energy for low power electron ic devices. The PZT cantilever is used d33 mode to get the electrical power. The PZT cantilever based energy harvester with the dimension of 7 mm${\times}$3 mm${\times}$0.03 mm is fabricated using micromachining technologies. This PZT cantilever has the mechanical resonance frequency with a 900 Hz. With these conditions, we get experimentally the 37 uW output power from this device with the application of 1g acceleration using the 900 Hz vibration. From this study, we show the feasibility of one of energy harvesting candidates using PZT based structure. This PZT energy harvester could be used for various applications such a batteryless micro sensors and micro power generators.