Design and implementation of an electromagnetic energy harvester for linear and rotary motion applications

This thesis presents a new design for an electromagnetic energy harvester to be used in both linear and rotary motion applications. This electromagnetic energy harvester consists of a moving coil within a fixed magnetic circuit. This magnetic circuit comprises of a permanent magnet (as a magnetic source), a magnetic conductor (such as iron), and an air gap to create a space for coil movement inside energy harvester setup. In the parameter study of this electromagnetic energy harvester, it has been demonstrated that applying design modifications will improve the amount of induced voltage by %50. For linear motion applications, the energy harvester has been mounted on a linear motor and the experimental results indicated that when the coil movements’ speed is 70 [mm/s], the maximum harvested power is 5.320 [mW]. For rotary motion applications, first a voice coil speaker has been used as a single degree of freedom system to produce voltage through a rotating beam and hub. Since in lower resonance frequencies, the maximum induced voltage is quite low, thus in next step, the two degrees of freedom energy harvesting system for rotary motion applications has been introduced. This system has been mounted on a car ring and the result illustrated that at the resonance frequency (15 [Hz]), the induced voltage was 0.175 [V] for each coil.