Electret-based aeroelastic harvester and its self-starting battery-free power management circuit

• Published in: 2015 IEEE 13th International New Circuits and Systems Conference (NEWCAS) pp. 1 - 4
• Main Authors: Perez, M., Boisseau, S., Gasnier, P., Willemin, J., Pourchier, N., Geisler, M., Reboud, J. L.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-06-2015
• Subjects: airflow energy harvesting; Bluetooth; Capacitors; electret; Electrets; Electrodes; electrostatic conversion; Electrostatics; Energy harvesting; fluttering; SECE; Wireless sensor networks
• DOI: 10.1109/NEWCAS.2015.7181988

This paper presents an airflow energy harvester coupling (i) fluttering phenomena to turn airflows kinetic power into mechanical oscillations of a flexible membrane and (ii) an electret-based electrostatic converter to turn the resulting mechanical oscillations into electricity. The device is able to work down to 5.5m/s and harvests up to 330μW at 9m/s with a surface of 70mm×55mm. It has been combined to a self-starting battery-free power management circuit to supply a Bluetooth Low Energy temperature sensor node, validating the complete Energy Harvesting chain. The power management circuit implements the Synchronous Electric Charge Extraction technique with a flyback architecture; it has a conversion efficiency reaching 60% and consumes about 1.2μA.