Design of energy harvesting systems for harnessing vibrational motion from human and vehicular motion [7643-48]

In much of the vibration-based energy harvesting literature, devices are modeled, designed, and tested for dissipating energy across a resistive load at a single base excitation frequency. This paper presents several practical scenarios germane to tracking, sensing, and wireless communication on humans and land vehicles. Measured vibrational data from these platforms are used to provide a time-varying, broadband input to the energy harvesting system. Optimal power considerations are given for several circuit topologies, including a passive rectifier circuit and active, switching methods. Under various size and mass constraints, the optimal design is presented for two scenarios: walking and idling a car. The frequency response functions are given alongside time histories of the power harvested using the experimental base accelerations recorded. The issues involved in designing an energy harvester for practical (i.e. timevarying, non-sinusoidal) applications are discussed.