Fabrication and characterization of a wideband MEMS energy harvester utilizing nonlinear springs

This paper presents the fabrication, characterization and modeling of a wideband MEMS electrostatic energy harvester utilizing nonlinear springs. The experimental results show that the vibration energy harvester displays a strong softening spring effect. For narrow band vibration, the energy harvester exhibits a widening bandwidth during frequency down-sweeps. For increasing levels of broadband random noise vibration, the energy harvester displays a broadening bandwidth response. Furthermore, the vibration energy harvester with softening springs not only increases the bandwidth, but also harvests more output power than a linear energy harvester at a sufficient level of broadband random vibration. At a broadband random vibration of 7.0 × 10−4 g2 Hz−1, we found that the bandwidth increases by more than 13 times and the average harvesting output power increases by 68% compared to that of a linear vibration energy harvester. Numerical analysis confirmed that the softening springs are responsible for the band broadening.