Experimental Validation of Damping Model for a MEMS Bistable Electrostatic Energy Harvester

This paper validates lumped models of an asymmetric bistable MEMS electrostatic energy harvester against measurements. A conventional model of constant damping coe cient turns out to be ine↵ective in predicting or reproducing the device response. This shortcoming is demonstrated by the e↵ective damping coe cient obtained from fits to experimental results being far from constant under varying operating conditions. Therefore, two di↵erent nonlinear models of the damping force in polynomial form are introduced and investigated. We find that the experimental results are well reproduced over the entire range of measured acceleration amplitudes by modeling with a phenomenological nonlinear damping force which is a high-order polynomial in the velocity.