The development of low power autonomous systems has triggered the research for waste energy recuperation. A micromachined generator has been designed to extract energy from vibrations in the ambient. It consists of an electrostatic transducer which is continuously polarized by an electret. The design of the generator has been optimized towards miniaturization. A prototype has been fabricated.

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The purpose of this article is to elaborate a model and the optimization guidelines for electret based harvesters with a specific electret/electrodes configuration, namely the slot-effect configuration. Slot-effect configured harvesters have been investigated experimentally by several research groups. A model describing their dynamic behavior has also been recently proposed in the literature. However, the simplifications used in the existing model can lead to inaccuracies and a refined analysis is elaborated in the present article. The model is compared with experimental measurements on MEMS fabricated devices with a corrugated electret. The electrodes dimensioning in the MEMS device are chosen so that the harvester behaves in a quasi-linear manner over its full range of displacement. This quasi-linearity simplifies greatly the device optimization. Indeed, the behavior of the developed electrostatic harvester is shown to be very comparable to that of piezoelectric harvesters, which are very well understood and documented. The influence of several design parameters on output power performance is investigated. As long as pull-in and breakdown voltage effects can be avoided, the electret surface potential should be maximized and the air gap minimized. We also investigate theoretically the influence of three types of electret on the generated power: planar, corrugated with partial charge coverage, and corrugated with full charge coverage. With the dimensions corresponding to our MEMS devices, the output power characteristics for the three types of electret are similar. However, it is shown that this is not always true. In some conditions, corrugated electrets with full charge coverage are detrimental for the generated power.

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