Inkjet 3D Printed MEMS Vibrational Electromagnetic Energy Harvester

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a powerful tool that enables the printing of almost unlimited geometry in a few hours, from a virtual design to a real structure. In this paper, we present a micro-electromechanical energy harvester that utilized a 3D printed micromechanical structure combined with a miniature permanent magnet and a microelectronic coil towards a hybrid electromagnetic vibrational hybrid energy harvester. Various micromechanical structure geometries were designed, printed, and tested. The characteristic dimensions of the springs were from 200 m to 400 m and the total volume of the devices was below 1 cm3. The resonant frequencies (95–340 Hz range), as well as bandwidths (6–23 Hz range), for the developed prototypes were determined. The maximal generated output power was almost 24 W with a power density up to almost 600 W/cm3.

A Review on Kinetic Energy Harvesting with Focus on 3D Printed Electromagnetic Vibration Harvesters

“…In order to achieve a self-powered sensor, the authors aimed to expand the harvester's bandwidth for a better overall energy conversion. In [44], a vibrational harvester was printed via inkjet (3D Systems ProJet 3510, materials: Visijet M3 Crystal and S300). The harvester was made of a printed body with a centred pad for a seismic mass.…”

“…Harvesters printed via inkjet came up quite recently. Inkjet offers better printing resolutions than FFF and therefore potential for miniaturised harvesters as seen in [44]. In some cases, the technology was not mentioned, but for ABS/PLA, it was most likely that FFF was utilised.…”

“…Furthermore, unintentional electromagnetic coupling can be avoided with 3D printing materials [53]. Miniaturisationopportunities have been shown for inkjet [44]. Taking a look outside the box, in [75] a triboelectric generator was realised with polyamide and the rubber-like material TangoBlack.…”

“…There are various applications mentioned; specific applications as well as potential fields of application. The most common fields are WSNs [44,52,58,66] as well as wearables/portable devices [24,46,54,62,63]. Health/fitness monitoring [62,63] are a subcategory of wearables.…”

Flourishing energy harvesters for future body sensor network: from single to multiple energy sources

“…As the number of sensors dramatically increases, it has been much more challenging to replace, manage, and/or recycle the gigantic amount of batteries. Thus, energy harvesting technologies have been proposed as a cost-effective solution to future sustainable systems ( Liu et al., 2018c ; Liu et al., 2015b ; Liu et al., 2020b ), which convert environmental energy that was dissipated and wasted into valuable electric energy in various ways ( Kawa et al., 2020 ; Liu et al., 2015a , 2018a , 2018b ). Generally, the available energy sources around us include mechanical energy ( Liu et al, 2013 , 2014 ), solar energy ( Hashemi et al., 2020 ), thermal energy ( Xie et al., 2011 ; Zhang et al., 2019a ), and biochemical energy ( Jeerapan et al., 2020 ).…”