Employing a MEMS plasma switch for conditioning high-voltage kinetic energy harvesters

Abstract

Triboelectric nanogenerators have attracted wide attention due to their promising capabilities of scavenging the ambient environmental mechanical energy. However, efficient energy management of the generated high-voltage for practical low-voltage applications is still under investigation. Autonomous switches are key elements for improving the harvested energy per mechanical cycle, but they are complicated to implement at such voltages higher than several hundreds of volts. This paper proposes a self-sustained and automatic hysteresis plasma switch made from silicon micromachining, and implemented in a two-stage efficient conditioning circuit for powering low-voltage devices using triboelectric nanogenerators. The hysteresis of this microelectromechanical switch is controllable by topological design and the actuation of the switch combines the principles of micro-discharge and electrostatic pulling, without the need of any power-consuming control electronic circuits. The experimental results indicate that the energy harvesting efficiency is improved by two orders of magnitude compared to the conventional full-wave rectifying circuit.

Rationally patterned electrode of direct-current triboelectric nanogenerators for ultrahigh effective surface charge density

“…Various TENGs have been intensively conducted in two categories: (i) coupling CE with electrostatic induction, the TENG gives an alternating current (AC-TENG) [6][7][8] ; (ii) coupling CE with electrostatic breakdown, the TENG generates a direct current (DC-TENG) 9,10 . These different types of TENGs provide effective techniques for harvesting distributed mechanical energy, wave energy, and biomechanical energy, and show a great potential in application of Internet of Things, implantable medical devices, and artificial intelligence as micro/nano energy or self-powered sensors [11][12][13][14][15][16] .…”

Electromechanical Modeling of Vibration-Based Piezoelectric Nanogenerator with Multilayered Cross-Section for Low-Power Consumption Devices

“…The first bending resonant frequency of the nanogenerator is obtained by substituting Equations (3) and (4) into Equation (5). Table 1 depicts the geometric parameters of the different layers of the nanogenerator used in the analytical model.…”

Triboelectric nanogenerator: from alternating current to direct current

“…Based on TE effect and electrostatic induction, triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) was first invented by Wang's Group in 2012 ( Fan et al., 2012 ), and it has attracted significant attention as an emerging mechanical energy harvesting technology owing to its various merits of simple structure, light weight, diverse choice of materials, low cost, and high efficiency even at low frequency ( He et al., 2020 ; Lin et al., 2013 ; Luo et al., 2019 ; Peng et al., 2019 , 2020 ; Song et al., 2019 ; Xiong et al., 2020 ; Yang et al., 2019 ; Zhang et al., 2018a , 2018b ; Zhu et al., 2014b ). Generally, the output of TENG is AC pulse feature, which must be converted to a DC output or even a constant current output across the power management circuit for powering electronics ( Harmon et al., 2020 ; Niu et al., 2015 ; Qin et al., 2018 ; Xi et al., 2017 ; Xu et al., 2019b ; Zhang et al., 2020b ). Recently, some studies about TENGs with DC output are emerging, which are named as DC-TENGs ( Liu et al., 2019a , 2020a ; Luo et al., 2018 ; Xu et al., 2020a ; Yang et al., 2014 ; Zhang et al., 2014 ; Zhu et al., 2020 ).…”