Out-of-Plane Continuous Electrostatic Micro-Power Generators

M A E Mahmoud; E M Abdel-Rahman; R R Mansour; E F El-Saadany

doi:10.3390/s17040877

Out-of-Plane Continuous Electrostatic Micro-Power Generators

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Apr 16;17(4):877. doi: 10.3390/s17040877.

Authors

M A E Mahmoud¹, E M Abdel-Rahman², R R Mansour³, E F El-Saadany⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ain Shams University, 1156 Cairo, Egypt. mohamed.elsheikh@eng.asu.edu.eg.
² Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1 ON, Canada. eihab@uwaterloo.ca.
³ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1 ON, Canada. rrmansour@uwaterloo.ca.
⁴ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1 ON, Canada. ehab@uwaterloo.ca.

Abstract

This paper presents an out-of-plane electrostatic micro-power generator (MPG). Electret-based continuous MPGs with different gaps and masses are fabricated to demonstrate the merits of this topology. Experimental results of the MPG demonstrate output power of 1 mW for a base acceleration amplitude and frequency of 0.08 g and 86 Hz. The MPGs also demonstrate a wideband harvesting bandwidth reaching up to 9 Hz. A free-flight and an impact mode model of electrostatic MPGs are also derived and validated by comparison to experimental results.

Keywords: electrostatic; micro-power generators; out-of-plane; wideband.