Energy Harvesting for Rotating Micro-Electronic

Energy Harvesting for Rotating Micro-Electronic Devices

Thesis

Energy harvesting has been around for several years and is used in several different applications to develop energy using a renewable energy such as wind or river current, and others simply optimize total power loss by using regenerative breaking or some other source of energy conservation. Energy conservation has sparked much attention in the last few years for micro-electronic devices, allowing a person to supply energy in an area where it is hard to supply energy, and inconvenient to replace batteries. The focus of this essay is to explore energy harvesting techniques used in rotary micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). By enabling the harvesting of energy in places where no source of power is present has provided many people in several fields obtain certain information in secluded places, which previously was a waste of many resources. Meteorologists can obtain weather information in the middle of the ocean without having to risk lives on boats, and also allowing for more accurate and faster severe weather alerts when large storms are heading towards the coast, allowing for extreme disasters like large hurricanes or tsunami from kill thousands of people, all thanks to the help of MEMS that are used to produce power where power is not readily available.

Technical Attributes

One application of a rotary magnetic generator MEMS is in the ocean, in what is called Micro Ocean Renewable Energy (MORE)[9]. The ocean currents raise and lower buoys; these translational movements are used to spin a gear box, Fig. 1[9]. In turn, the gear box is connected to the shaft of the armature that spins inside a stator as shown in Fig. 2[9]. As the armature rotates though the air gap, the magnetic field induced around the coil due to the magnets acts as the regenerative mode of the motor, where slip is less than 0 [5]. The resulting rotating magnetic field induces current though a wire, which is then...