IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 25, NO.

8, AUGUST 2010

1989

Analytical Model of a Vibrating Electromagnetic Harvester Considering Nonlinear Effects

Enrico Dallago, Member, IEEE, Marco Marchesi, and Giuseppe Venchi
AbstractIn this paper, an analytical model of a vibrating electromagnetic harvester, taking into account nonlinear effects, is presented. Knowing the acceleration applied to the harvester system, the model is able to predict the performance of the harvester in terms of induced voltage on the load. The energy transducer consists of four magnets, two movable and two xed, arranged in a way such that both xed magnets repel the moveable one. The model was implemented in Simulink and exploits the results of a nite element method (FEM) solver (Flux2D) to estimate the non-linear electromagnetic repulsion force and the ux linkage by the coil. To evaluate the effect of a load applied to the harvester, the effect of the Lorentzs force, caused by the interaction of the current that ows in the coil and the ux density of the moveable magnet, was taken into account. As a consequence, the error in the estimate of induced voltage, at resonance, is reduced from about 80% to 7%. Finally, at resonance, the maximum power that could be delivered by the harvester and dissipated on a resistive load was estimated to be about 6 mW. Index TermsElectromagnetic harvester, energy harvesting, magnetic transducer.

I. INTRODUCTION

OWADAYS, the concept of energy harvesting has gained a large consideration in the scientic community because of the continuous decrease in the power consumption of microelectronic devices and systems [1][4]. For example, the power consumption of sensor network systems, wireless sensors or smart dust is becoming so low to allow driving them with the energy stored in a capacitor or in a super-capacitor by a harvester. Recently, different types of harvesters, both integrated [5][10] and macroscopic [11][17] have been presented. Furthermore, the possibility to merge different types of technologies has been presented in [18]. All these efforts are aimed at using an energy harvester to drive portable or wireless devices. Among the various types of available environmental energy, vibrations have always been focused on by a lot of researchers because a number of different transducers can successfully be employed (e.g., magnetic, piezoelectric, or electrostatic devices).

Integrated harvesters, i.e., systems in which not only the frontend circuitry but also the transducer itself are integrated, are rapidly improving; nevertheless, the energy they can actually harvest is still not enough, mainly because the efciency of a given transducer principle reduces as the physical dimensions are reduced, especially, if one considers the typical frequency distribution of vibrations in the environment and the fact that most transducers are resonators. On the contrary, macroscopic devices [4], [12], [19] can be used right now to drive wearable devices. This is why this paper focuses on a macroscopic electromagnetic transducer. One of the main issues of these harvesters is the necessity of having an efcient front-end circuitry, in order to supply it with the same energy the harvester stores in the intermediate storage stage (e.g., a capacitor or super-capacitor), so as to implement a fully self-powered system. Furthermore, the front-end circuitry has to load the transducer in an optimal way to maximize the gathered energy. In this scenario, the design, tuning, and optimization phases could largely benet from an analytical model of the transducer representing precisely the physical behavior of the transducer. This is, particularly, true when realistic working conditions (in which all quantities, both physical and electrical, vary signicantly in time) are considered. In literature, different analytical analyses of vibrating electromagnetic harvesters have been presented [1][4], [20]. Those models are based on the solution of the second Newtons law of the inertial harvesting system in which the magnetic force, which could be due to the interaction of two magnets or a magnet and a yoke, is linear with respect to the position. Moreover, in the aforesaid analytical models, the instantaneous displacement of the moving mass of the harvester is the input quantity. In this paper, a different approach is presented: it is still based on the solution of the second Newtons law but it takes the nonlinearity of magnetic force, evaluated with a nite element method (FEM) tool (Flux2D) into account; furthermore, the input variable is the acceleration applied to the entire harvester, which is usually readily available. Finally, the effect of the current owing in the sensing coil when loaded by a resistor is modeled. The obtained model is discussed by comparing its simulations with experimental results. II. STRUCTURE OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC ENERGY HARVESTER AND ITS ANALYTICAL MODEL The analytical model introduced in this paper was based on the energy transducer presented in [19], which, on its turn, can be considered a variation of the system proposed in [21]. The harvester, shown in Fig. 1, has been realized exploiting: 1) a 15-mm inner diameter and 56 mm long teon tube;

Manuscript received July 24, 2009; revised September 21, 2009 and December 20, 2009. Date of current version June 25, 2010. This work was supported by the Italian Ministry of University under FIRB project RBAP065425 Analog and Mixed-Mode Microelettronics for Advanced Systems. Recommended for publication by Associate Editor C. R. Sullivan. The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Pavia, 27100 Pavia, Italy (e-mail: enrico.dallago@unipv.it; marco. marchesi@unipv.it; giuseppe.venchi@unipv.it). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TPEL.2010.2044893

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1990

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 25, NO. 8, AUGUST 2010

Fig. 2.

Ideal inertial vibration based energy harvesting.

Some analysis approaches to this type of harvester have been introduced in [1][3] and further analyzed in [5], [20], and [22][25]. On the basis of the system analysis, the solution of the second Newtons law and approximating everything as linear, the differential equation for the motion of the seismic mass m relative to the housing is
Fig. 1. Energy transducer simulated with Flux2D.

m(t) = kx(t) bx(t) m(t) x u

(1)

2) four magnets: two xed magnets at the extreme (in the form of disk, with diameter of 10 mm and 1 mm thick) and two levitating magnet (in the form of disk with diameter of 15 mm and 8 mm thick). The levitation is obtained by a suitable arrangement of the magnetic poles in the assembly as shown in Fig. 1, where N is the North and S is the South pole. The magnets are commercial NdFeB, with residual magnetic induction (Br ) equal to 1.3 T. The moving mass of the levitating magnets is equal to 0.0209 g; 3) a coil of 500 turns, realized with copper wire with a diameter of 0.11 mm, and a resulting resistance of about 60 in which a voltage is induced by the motion of the two levitating magnets. The xed magnets, that have been placed at the ends of the teon tube, were selected so as to have a smaller diameter with respect to the inner diameter: this allows the air to be easily expelled off the tube when the middle magnets vibrate, therefore, reducing its contribution to the damping. Other sources of damping are the mechanical damping, which is due to friction between magnets and the teon tube, and the electrical damping, which is due to the current that ows in the coil when a voltage is induced. Such a system is typically modeled as a mass m, a spring of stiffness k, and a damper system b, as shown in Fig. 2. When an external acceleration is applied to the housing (i.e., the teon tube), the mass moves with respect to the housing and to the coil and an induced voltage appears at the coils terminals. To calculate this, the motion law of the mass has to be derived. In the following, the displacement of the mass from its rest position with respect to the housing is x(t); the position of the housing with respect to an external reference frame (the one in which the applied acceleration is dened) is u(t), and that of the seismic mass is u(t) + x(t).

where x, x, x are the position, the velocity, and the acceleration of the mass m, respectively, while u is the external accelera tion applied to the housing. In [2] and [3], the solution of (1) considering a sinusoidal movement for the housing, leads to the denition of the power dissipated in the damping element Pd = mU 2 (w/wn )3 w3 [1 (w/wn )2 ]2 + [2(w/wn )]2 (2)

where w is the frequency of the external vibration; wn is the natural frequency of the system = k/m; U is the amplitude of the displacement of the housing due to the vibration; is the damping ratio = b/(2mwn ). Since, up to now, no interaction with the coil has been considered, this power, which is purely mechanical, is the total power made available in such a system as a consequence of the application of an external acceleration. In case this power was completely converted into electric power then it would also represent the electrical power ideally available from the transducer. This result has some limitations. First of all, it considers the equivalent spring as a linear one, in which the stiffness is independent on the position of the mass. In the presented case, this is true only when the displacement of the levitating magnets is negligible or very small with respect to the distance between the moving and the xed magnets. When this hypothesis is not veried, signicant errors can take place. Furthermore, we are more interested in deriving the electrical power that can be actually obtained from the transducer than in the power that can potentially be obtained. The approach of this paper is to rewrite (1) as follows: u m(t) = FM AG (x) bx(t) m(t) mg x (3)

where FM AG (x) is the non-linear magnetic repulsion force given by the interaction of the magnets and depends on the

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DALLAGO et al.: ANALYTICAL MODEL OF A VIBRATING ELECTROMAGNETIC HARVESTER CONSIDERING NONLINEAR EFFECTS

1991

Fig. 3.

Magnetic repulsion force evaluated with Flux2D.

Fig. 4. Magnetic repulsion force in the range of 4 mm with respect to the starting position of the moving magnets.

position (as we will show in the following it can be evaluated with an FEM tool), and g is the gravity of the earth. Including gravity in the force balance equation is mandatory when the transducer is placed vertically, while it could be neglected for a horizontal one. Intermediate orientations could be addressed by replacing the mg term with mg cos(), where is the angle of the transducer axis with respect to the vertical direction. This equation can then be solved directly by means of suitable numerical methods in order to calculate the instantaneous position of the moving magnets with respect to the sensing coil when a given acceleration pattern is applied to the transducer. In this way, the induced voltage and, consequently, the output power can be evaluated. III. SIMULINK AND FEM ANALYSIS To solve (3), it is necessary to know the repulsion magnetic force (FM AG ) at each relative position between the magnets. This type of analysis can be performed exploiting a magnetic nite element solver, such as FLUX2D. The force versus position characteristic was obtained by calculating the magnetic force at a number of positions of about 130 in the range 16.5 mm with respect to the center of the teon tube (see Fig. 3). The actual maximum excursion is about 19 mm, but since the force grows signicantly and in a nonlinear way as the distance between the magnets decreases, as Fig. 3 demonstrates, it is useless to extend the analysis further. A linear approximation of the magnetic force with a reasonable error could be applied only in the range of 4 mm with respect to the center of the tube, as shown in Fig. 4. To solve (3) in a numerical simulator (e.g., Simulink), it is better to t the curve of Fig. 3 with a sixth-order polynomial, which is also shown in Fig. 3 itself. The resulting model was solved by implementing it in Simulink. In particular, (3) was rewritten as following: x(t) = b FM AG (x) x(t) u(t) g. m m (4)

Fig. 5. Flux linkage by the coil as a function of the position of the moving magnets.

It is important to stress that in (3) and (4) u is the acceleration applied to the housing and measured with the accelerometer, while x is the acceleration of the moving mass. The magnetic simulator was also used to calculate the ux linkage by the sensing coil as a function of the relative position between the moving magnets and the coil itself. The obtained characteristic is shown in Fig. 5, which also gives the expression of its sixth-order interpolating polynomial. This graph allows to compute the ux linkage versus time as the magnets move; its derivative with respect to time gives the induced voltage. IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP AND RESULTS In order to solve (4), it is necessary to know the damping factor. The damping is a parameter that strictly depends on the particular system and, in general, is not easy to predict. In

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 25, NO. 8, AUGUST 2010

Fig. 6. Experimental setup and a photo of the teon tube with the levitating magnets.

Fig. 8. Experimental (solid line) and simulation (dashed line) induced voltage; applied acceleration of 1 g at 9 Hz.

nonlinearity. The damping factor b was then estimated by means of the following denition: km wn = . (5) Q= b b This formula is the only explicit linearization step in the evaluation of the b factor. The estimated value was found out to be about 0.31 Ns/m. Knowing the value of the damping factor, the complete simulation can now be run, obtaining, for example, the waveform of the induced voltage in the coil in a no-load condition. A comparison between the simulated and the measured voltage is offered in Fig. 8. As it can be seen, the matching is satisfactory: the amplitude mismatch is lower than 0.075 V considering that the peak is about 2.25 V. The shape of the induced voltage (a large peak followed by a lower peak) is due to the offset in the starting position of the moving mass with respect to the center of the tube. This offset, of about 2.5 mm, is caused by the gravity, which slightly compresses the lower equivalent magnetic spring. To better understand the shape of the induced voltage, the position versus time and the ux linkage, whose derivative is the induced voltage, versus time are shown in Fig. 9. This offset should be considered also when a linear approximation of the magnetic force versus position is used, because it moves the interval of abscissa where to apply the linearization. For example, Fig. 9 shows the linear approximation in the position range from 6 to 2 mm. In this case, the resulting linearized k is slightly higher than the one obtained in Fig. 4. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated that in both cases the full model, including the spring nonlinearity, outperforms the linearized ones as shown in Fig. 10, which presents a comparison between the measured induced voltage and those simulated by the three considered models (the full model and the two linearizations). This time-domain

Fig. 7. Measured peak of induced voltage varying the frequency of the applied acceleration.

this paper, it was obtained by estimating it on a prototype (see Fig. 6). The experimental setup consists of a shaker, a function generator, and an accelerometer. The function generator drives the amplier of the shaker, which is of the open loop type: it supplies a current to the shaker which is proportional to the reference signal of the function generator and the resulting acceleration depends on the dynamics of the assembly. (In a closed loop type, an on-board accelerometer is exploited so as to apply acceleration to the assembly, which is proportional to the reference signal). For this reason, only sinusoidal accelerations were considered, varying the amplitude and the frequency. The real amplitude of the applied acceleration was monitored with a MEMS accelerometer, mounted below the assembly. Initially, the amplitude of the applied acceleration was xed at 1 g and the peak of the induced voltage was measured while varying the frequency. This measurement, shown in Fig. 7, allowed evaluating the quality factor, which is about 4.24. It is worth noting that the measurement of Fig. 7 forces the system to work in a nonlinear region, especially, around the resonance; thus the measured Q indirectly includes the contribution of this

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DALLAGO et al.: ANALYTICAL MODEL OF A VIBRATING ELECTROMAGNETIC HARVESTER CONSIDERING NONLINEAR EFFECTS

1993

Fig. 9.

(a) Flux linkage versus time at frequency resonance and (b) Position of movable magnets versus time at frequency resonance. TABLE I SIMULATED AND MEASURED PEAK OF THE INDUCED VOLTAGE AT DIFFERENT DRIVING FREQUENCY

Fig. 10.

Magnetic repulsion force in the range of 6 to 2 mm.

comparison between simulation and experimental results was performed in the frequency range of Fig. 7, keeping the amplitude xed at 1 g. The results have been summarized in Table I. Moreover, considering the linear approximation of Fig. 10, it is also possible to estimate the resonance frequency exploiting the denition 1 k wn = . (6) 2 2 m It comes out to be about 10.4 Hz, in good agreement with the measurement of Fig. 7. Driving the system with an external acceleration at the aforesaid frequency, the harvester should give the maximum induced voltage, as it is conrmed in Table I and shown in Fig. 12. To complete the study of the proposed model, a sensitivity analysis of its behavior with respect to the damping factor was carried out, by simulating the frequency response in terms of the fn =

Fig. 11. Comparison between the simulation, (with and without nonlinear force effects), and measured induced voltage at 9 Hz.

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 25, NO. 8, AUGUST 2010

Fig. 12. Comparison between simulated (dashed line) and measured (solid line) induced voltage at mechanical resonance.

Fig. 13. factor.

Simulated induced voltage varying the frequency and the damping

peak of the induced voltage at various damping factors between 0.21 Ns/m to 0.41 Ns/m in steps of 0.05 Ns/m. The acceleration was kept constant at 1 g. The results are presented in Fig. 13. As expected, increasing the value of the damping factor the peak amplitude of the induced voltage decreases, in accordance with the denition of (4) and (6). This effect is maximized at the resonance, resulting in a large variation of the induced voltage for a little variation of the damping factor. Moreover, the increased damping factor causes a variation of the resonance frequency, in accordance with the following denition: wm ax = wn 1 b2 2km (7)

effect in the proposed magnetic conguration and is the one that was implemented. In order to include the Lorentzs force, (4) is modied as follows: x(t) = b FM AG (x) x(t) u(t) g m m (2rm ean-coil )N Bradial (x) Vind m R

(8)

where wm ax corresponds to the frequency where the maximum induced voltage occurs. V. EFFECT OF THE LOAD ON THE PERFORMANCE OF THE HARVESTER The analysis presented so far is based on the hypothesis that the harvester works under no-load condition. When a load is connected to the coil and, as a consequence, a current ows in it, another effect takes place. With a resistive load, the actual load voltage not only decreases because of the resistive divider between the coil series resistance and the load resistance, but also it is further reduced by the interaction between the coil current and the moving magnets. This interaction consists of various effects. A rst effect can be modeled, given the current in the coil, computing the magnetic eld generated by the coil itself by means of its self-inductance. This eld interacts with the eld of the moving magnet and gives rise to a damping of the vibration. Another effect is the resulting Lorentzs force on the coil due to the interaction between the current and the magnetic eld of the movable magnet. This effect is the predominant

where N is the number of turns of the coil, Bradial is the radial component of the levitating magnets magnetic eld, Vind /R is the current that ows in the coil (expressed in terms of induced voltage divided by the total resistance R, i.e., the sum of the internal resistance of the coil and the load resistance), 2rm ean-coil is the mean length of a turn of the coil. Inductive effects on the voltage are neglected due to the small self-inductance and low frequency of operation, which is a small reactance with respect to the resistance of the coil. In order to solve the (8), an estimate of the radial component of the levitating magnets magnetic eld (Bradial ), on a line at the mean radius of the coil and along its cross section (see Fig. 1), is required. It can, once again, be obtained by using Flux2D. The results are shown in Fig. 14. Finally, the Simulink model was modied to take into account the Lorentzs force, giving rise to the complete model shown in Fig. 15. To demonstrate the weight of this phenomenon on the global performances of the transducer, an analysis was carried out, evaluating the peak load voltage for a given acceleration amplitude and frequency while varying the load resistance. Fig. 16 shows the obtained results when an external acceleration of 1 g, at 9 Hz is considered, while Fig. 17 refers to 1 g acceleration when the frequency is equal to the resonance frequency of the harvester. As expected, the difference between the three curves vanishes as the load resistance is high enough to approach the no-load condition. On the contrary, the effect of the Lorentzs force becomes evident for lower load values, and it is emphasized at resonance:

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DALLAGO et al.: ANALYTICAL MODEL OF A VIBRATING ELECTROMAGNETIC HARVESTER CONSIDERING NONLINEAR EFFECTS

1995

Fig. 14.

Magnetic eld, on the middle length of the coil, in the useful direction for the Lorentzs force generation.

Fig. 15. Simulink model that takes the reaction to the induced voltage into account.

Fig. 17. Peak of the output voltage at various resistive load at 10.4 Hz. Red line (+): Lorentzs force is neglected; black line (): Lorentzs force is included in the model; blue line (o): measured voltage.

Fig. 16. Peak of the output voltage at various resistive load at 9 Hz. Red line (+): Lorentzs force is neglected; black line (): Lorentzs force is included in the model; blue line (o): measured voltage.

the maximum error in Fig. 16 between the measurement and the simulations without the Lorentzs force is about 20%, while in Fig. 17, it is about 80%. Including the reaction of the induced voltage the model drops the error to 6% and 7% at resonance and at 9 Hz, respectively. All these considerations are important since one of the most relevant parameters for energy harvesting transducers is the optimum load resistance, that is the resistance that allows the maximum power to be drawn from the transducer itself. When the reaction of the induced voltage is neglected the harvester can be modeled as a simple Thevenin equivalent circuit and the optimum load resistance is equal to the output resistance, i.e., the coil series resistance. In the real case, the optimum load cannot be easily calculated starting from the electrical parameters of the transducer. Furthermore, only the

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[1] P. D. Mitcheson, T. C. Green, E. M. Yeatman, and A. S. Holmes, Architectures for vibration-driven micropower generators, J. Microelectromech. Syst., vol. 13, no. 3, pp. 429440, 2004. [2] S. P. Beeby, M. J. Tudor, R. N. Torah, S. Roberts, T. ODonnell, and S. Roy, Experimental comparison of macro and micro scale electromagnetic vibration powered generators, Microsyst. Technol., vol. 13, pp. 16471653, 2007. [3] J. M. Gilbert and F. Balouchi, Comparison of energy harvesting systems for wireless sensor networks, Int. J. Autom. Comput., vol. 5, pp. 334347, 2008. [4] D. Mitcheson, E. M. Yeatman, G. K. Rao, A. S. Holmes, and T. C. Green, Energy harvesting from human and machine motion for wireless electronic devices, Proc. IEEE, vol. 96, no. 9, pp. 14571486, Sep. 2008. [5] P. D. Mitcheson, E. K. Reilly, T. Toh, P. K. Wright, and E. M. Yeatman, Performance limits of the three MEMS inertial energy generator transduction types, J. Micromech. Microeng., vol. 17, pp. S211S216, 2007. [6] H. Raisigel, O. Cugat, and J. Delamare, Permanent magnet planar microgenerators, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 130131, pp. 438444, 2006. [7] G. De Pasquale and A. Som` , Investigations on energy scavenging a method using MEMS devices, in Proc. Int. Semicond. Conf., CAS 2008, pp. 163166. [8] H.-C. Song, H.-C. Kim, C.-Y. Kang, H.-J. Kim, S.-J. Yoon, and D.-Y. Jeong, Multilayer piezoelectric energy scavenger for large current generation, J. Electroceram, vol. 23, pp. 301304, 2008. [9] S. Dalola, M. Ferrari, V. Ferrari, M. Guizzetti, D. Marioli, and A. Taroni, Characterization of thermoelectric modules for powering autonomous sensors, IEEE Trans. Instrum. Meas., vol. 58, no. 1, pp. 99107, Jan. 2009. [10] P. D. Mitcheson, P. Miao, B. H. Stark, E. M. Yeatman, A. S. Holmes, and T. C. Green, MEMS electrostatic micropower generator for low frequency operation, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 115, pp. 523529, 2004. [11] H. K lah and K. Naja, Energy scavenging from low-frequency vibrau tions by using frequency up-conversion for wireless sensor applications, IEEE Sensors J., vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 261268, Mar. 2008. [12] P. Glynne-Jones, M. J. Tudor, S. P. Beeby, and N. M. White, An electromagnetic, vibration-powered generator for intelligent sensor systems, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 110, pp. 344349, 2004. [13] R. A. Le n, C. A. Pina, A. Yenilmez, I. N. Tansel, C. M. Pereira, and o Luz E. Roth, Development of a small energy scavenger, presented at the Florida Conf. Recent Adv. Robot. (FCRAR), Miami, Florida, 2006. [14] D. P. Arnold, Review of microscale magnetic power generation, IEEE Trans. Magn., vol. 43, no. 11, pp. 39403951, Nov. 2007. [15] C. O. Mathuna, T. ODonnell, R. V. Martinez-Catala, J. Rohan, and B. OFlynn, Energy scavenging for long-term deployable wireless sensor networks, Talanta, vol. 75, pp. 613623, 2008. [16] J. P. Thomasa, M. A. Qidwai, and J. C. Kellogg, Energy scavenging for small-scale unmanned systems, J. Power Sources, vol. 159, pp. 1494 1509, 2006. [17] M Lallart, L. Garbuio, L. Petit, C. Richard, and D. Guyomar, Double Synchronized Switch Harvesting (DSSH): A new energy harvesting scheme for efcient energy extraction, IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelectr., Freq. Control, vol. 55, no. 10, pp. 21192130, Oct. 2008. [18] X. Wu, A. Khaligh, and Y. Xu, Modeling, design and optimization of hybrid electromagnetic and piezoelectric MEMS energy scavengers, in Proc. IEEE 2008 Custom Intergr. Circuits Conf. (CICC), pp. 177180. [19] C. R. Saha, T. ODonnell, N. Wang, and P. McCloskey, Electromagnetic generator for harvesting energy from human motion, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 147, pp. 248253, 2008. [20] G. Poulin, E. Sarraute, and F. Costa, Generation of electrical energy for portable devices Comparative study of an electromagnetic and a piezoelectric system, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 116, pp. 461471, 2004. [21] J. M. H. Lee, S. C. L. Yuen, W. J. Li, and P. H. W Leong, Development of an AA size energy transducer with micro resonators, in Proc. IEEE Int. Symp. Circuit Syst. (ISCAS), May 2003, vol. 4, pp. 876879. [22] C. B. Williams and R. B. Yates, Analysis of a micro-electric generator for Microsystems, Sens. Actuators A, vol. 52, pp. 811, 1996. [23] S. Shearwood and R. B. Yates, Development of an electromagnetic microgenerator, Electron. Lett., vol. 33, no. 22, pp. 18831884, Oct. 1997. [24] R. Amirtharajah and A. P. Chandrakasan, Self-powered signal processing using vibration-based power generation, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 33, no. 5, pp. 687695, May 1998.

Fig. 18. Mean power delivered to the load as a function of the load resistance. Solid line: model without the Lorentzs force; dashed line: model with the Lorentzs force.

accurate model can correctly predict the actual available power. Fig. 18 demonstrates the concept, showing the comparison, at the resonance frequency, between the output mean power calculated with and without the Lorentzs force. Taking the Lorentzs force into consideration, reduces the available power by approximately 54%, while the optimum load changes from 60 to 140 . This last data could be a crucial point in the realization of a front-end circuitry. VI. CONCLUSION In this paper, a vibration energy transducer for energy harvesting application was presented; the focus is on the model that was developed to simulate its performance. The model, implemented in Simulink, exploits an FEM solver (Flux2D) to take into account nonlinear effects, making it able to predict the performance of the harvester when different external acceleration are applied to the system. The same model has been modied to include the effect of a resistive load connected directly to the coil of the harvester. Considering an external acceleration at a frequency equal to the resonance frequency of the mechanical system, the maximum error in terms of peak of the output voltage was reduced from 80% to about 7%. The modied model proved to be effective also in predicting the available output power and the optimum load. The proposed model could be used to analyze the effect of a circuitry connected to the harvester. In fact, to evaluate the best topology for a front-end circuitry, e.g., to store the energy on a tank, an analytical model of the scavenger which accurately simulates its physics could be very helpful. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author would like to thank A. Fanzio, Department of Electronic Engineering of the University of Pavia, for the help in the realization of the prototype and Cedrat, Grenoble France, for the use of its software tools.

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1997

[25] S. C. L. Yuen, J. M. H. Lee, W. J. Li, and P. H. W. Leong, An AA-sized micro power generator and its application to a wireless sensor system, IEEE Pervasive Comput., vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 6472, Mar. 2006.

Enrico Dallago (M87) was born in Bolzano, Italy, in 1949. He received the Dr.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in 1974. In 1974, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Pavia, where he is currently a Full Professor of power electronics, and founded the Power Electronics Research Group. His research interests include circuit simulation, high-frequency switching power supplies, power integrated circuits, thermal analysis of electronic systems, magnetic sensors, and energy-harvesting systems. Prof. Dallago is a member of the Italian Electrical and Electronic Association.

Giuseppe Venchi was born in Pavia, Italy, in 1970. He received the Dr.Eng. degree in electronics engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pavia, Pavia, in 1996 and 2000, respectively. He is currently a Researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Pavia. Since 2004, he has been cooperating with the National Center for Oncological Hadrontherapy, Milan, Italy (CNAO), where he is currently in charge of the power supplies of the CNAO synchrotron. His research interests include device and packaging thermal analysis, circuit simulation, development of integrated smart-power circuits, magnetic eld sensors, energy harvesting, and power supplies for particle accelerators.

Marco Marchesi was born in Castelsangiovanni, Italy, in 1975. He received the Dr.Eng. degree in electronics engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in 2002 and 2006, respectively. In 2006, he joined the Research and Development Division of STMicroelectronics, Cornaredo, Italy. Since 2009, he has been with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Pavia. His research interests include magnetic sensors for low magnetic eld detection, magnetic and mechanical nite-element method simulations for microelectromechanical systems devices and energy harvesting transducers. He is the author or coauthor of more than ve papers published in international journals, more than 15 presentations presented at international conferences (with published proceedings).

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