Dr. Einar Halvorsen
Institute for Microsystem Technology, Vestfold University, Norway
June 26, 2009 | 12:00 to 01:00 | 521 Cory Hall, Hogan Room
Host: Igor Paprotny
Energy harvesting presently receives considerable attention as a means to power wireless sensors. At Vestfold University College we conduct research on MEMS energy harvesters that utilize electrostatic or piezoelectric conversion. This talk will highlight our work from the past two years on theory and modeling of such devices and present device examples. Sinusoidal vibrations are convenient for characterization and analysis of energy harvesters, but they do not represent well all real world cases because vibrations sometimes are broad banded compared to the bandwidth of a the device. We have therefore developed a theory of energy harvesters subject to broadband excitations that will be presented. Analytical results are hard to obtain for devices that exhibit nonlinearities; either in the mechanical behavior, the electromechanical transduction, or in the power management circuitry which load the harvester. The talk will show examples of lumped modeling of devices with one or more of these effects taken into account. Finally the talk will present measurements on some of our electrostatic energy harvester designs.
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