Design and implementation of mechanical resonators for optimized inertial electromagnetic microgenerators

This work describes the design and implementation of an electromagnetic inertial microgenerator for energy scavenging from ambient vibrations. The structure of the device is based in a mechanical resonator formed by a permanent magnet (inertial mass) mounted on a polymeric membrane, in combination with a fixed micromachined coil. ANSYS simulations are carried out to investigate the influence of the resonator geometry on the resonant frequency and on the parasitic damping, and to analyze the optimum geometry of the coil for optimization of the electromagnetic coupling in the devices. Generator prototypes have been fabricated with a modular manufacturing process in which the electromagnetic converter and the mechanical resonator are manufactured separately, diced and then assembled. The experimental results show the ability of these devices to generate power levels in the range of 50 μW with output voltages in the range of hundreds of mV. The parasitic damping of the resonator structures is estimated from the fitting of the experimental data, and suggests the existence of an intrinsic limitation of the polymers related to spring stiffening effects at large excitation amplitudes. The comparison of the simulations and the experimental results indicate that further optimizations of this parameter and of the coil series resistance would allow increasing the generated power in more than one order of magnitude.