Energy harvesting is a new emerging technology which is used to gather am- bient energy from all surroundings. Dielectric Electro Active... Show moreEnergy harvesting is a new emerging technology which is used to gather am- bient energy from all surroundings. Dielectric Electro Active Polymer (DEAP) is a new material for energy harvesting based on mechanical-to-electric energy conversion. By using MATLAB simulation, a new system design based on DEAP is proposed to harvest energy. In the proposed system, the energy harvesting and the feedback cir- cuit loops can keep the system working without an external source. The simulation results show that the proposed system can harvest energy, and the bias voltage can be supplied by the system itself. Hence, no external source is needed. For circuit level design, based on two different vibration input patterns in terms of mechanical vibration frequency and displacement, two topologies of system forward paths which include DEAP generator, voltage regulation circuit and DC-DC buck converter are designed. For the low frequency high displacement vibration input pattern, a low frequency forward path is developed by using Zener diode regulator. For the high frequency low displacement input pattern, a high frequency forward path is designed by using Butterworth low pass filter. PSPICE simulation results prove that both of the proposed circuits work properly to generate steady DC voltage for energy harvesting. Finally, a prototyping circuit including a low pass filter and a battery charging module is implemented in experiment to verify the feasibility of partial system func- tion. The results show that the prototyping circuit for the proposed energy harvesting system by using DEAP can work well. M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 2012 Show less
