A

DISSERTATION
ON
“MICRO POWER

ELECTROSTATIC GENERATOR”
In The Partial Fulfillment of Diploma EngineeringSubmitted
By

Barun Kumar Singh (D202101956)

UNDER THE SUPER-VISION OF

Mr. Sanjoy Banerjee

Lecturer, BCP

BENGAL COLLEGE OF POLYTECHNIC, DURGAPUR

Sahid Sukumar Banerjee Sarani, Bidhannagar, Durgapur-713212
West Bengal
 BENGAL COLLEGE OF POLYTECHNIC
Approved by AICTE, New Delhi and affiliated to WBSCT&VE&SD,Kolkata

CERTIFICATE OF ACCEPTANCE OF EVALUATION

COMMITTEE
The dissertation entitled “ Micro Power Electrostatic Generator ” has been prepared and submitted by
Barun Kumar Singh from department of Electrical Engineering in partial fulfillment of the
requirement for the award of degree of diploma in electrical engineering at BENGAL COLLEGE OF
POLYTECHNIC, Durgapur and is here by accepted for the award of degree.

Name and Designation Evaluation Signature

MR. MANISH KUMAR Satisfactory/Not satisfactory

Principal In-charge
BCP, Durgapur

MR. PRONOY DAS CHOUDHURY Satisfactory/Not satisfactory

H.O.D
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
BCP, Durgapur

MR. ABHIJIT GHOSH Satisfactory/Not satisfactory

Project Co-ordinator
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
BCP, Durgapur

MR. SANJOY BANERJEE Satisfactory/Not satisfactory

Lecturer
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
BCP, Durgapur

The dissertation has been examined by the evaluation committee and found acceptable.
 BENGAL COLLEGE OF POLYTECHNIC
Approved by AICTE, New Delhi and affiliated to WBSCT&VE&SD,Kolkata

SELF ATTESTED
This is to certify that we have ourselves worked on the dissertation untitled “Micro Power
Electrostatic Generator”. This result mentioned in the reports has been generated during the work
and analyses are genuine. It is the result of extensive work carried out by us. The data and information
obtained from other agencies has been dully acknowledged. The report and result submitted forward of
the Diploma and Electrical Engineering is a research is a work carried out by us. The dissertation has
not been submitted for the award of diploma in any other university.

Date: Participate candidate

Place- Durgapur (Barun Kumar Singh)

 ABSTRACT

We developed a novel, yet simple, micro electret power generator prototype for low-
frequency energy harvesting applications. In this prototype, two electrodes of the
power generator are placed on the stator. The rotor is only a plate with metal strips of
half of the spatial frequency of the stator plate. The packaging is to simply fix the
stator to a container and put the rotor directly on top of the stator. CYTOP, a MEMS-
compatible perfluoropolymer, served as the electret material and charged with corona
charging. The power output was 2.267μW at 60Hz.

Just as the electromagnetic force can be used to generate electrical power, the
electrostatic force can also be used to convert mechanical energy into an electrical
form. Electromagnetic generators are used in large power stations because scaling
laws show them to be superior at larger sizes. However, on the micro-scale, the
electrostatic force becomes significant and so is suitable for electrical power
generation. There are several different methods of operation in which the electrostatic
force can be used to generate electrical energy. In this paper we discuss these
methods and their relative merits in terms of power density, the suitability of the
method to performing maximal power point tracking and difficulties of generator
fabrication.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We deem it a privilege to have been the student of BENGAL COLLEGE OF POLYTECHNIC,

DURGAPUR Department of Electrical Engineering. We are grateful to our advisor MR. SANJOY
BANERJEE, Lecturer, department of ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING, for introducing us to
this topic, his kind support, guidance, and encouragement throughout the dissertation work.

We would also take this opportunity to express our gratitude and sincere thanks to our
Principal in Charge MR. MANISH KUMAR, Bengal College Of Polytechnic and MR. PRONOY
DAS CHOUDHURY, HOD Of Electrical Engineering Department for his invaluable advice,
encouragement, aspiration and blessing.

We would like to take chance to express our appreciation to our family member for
constant prayer support and inspirational encouragements and moral supports which enables us to
pursue our studies. Their continuous love and support gave us strength to pursuing our dream.
Special thanks to our friend and other members of the department for being so supportive and helpful
in every possible way. We are very thankful to our entire faculty and staff members of Electrical
Engineering, Bengal College of polytechnic, and Durgapur for their direct and indirect help and
co-operation.

Best Regards to All of You!

Student Signature
 INDEX
Sr.No Title Page No

1. Introduction 01

Transduction Types 03
03
2.  Electromagnetic
04
 Electrostatic
3. Device Design 05

4. Device Fabrication 06

5. Experimental Details 09

Results and Discussion 10

6.

7. Conclusion 12

Reference 13
 1. Introduction

During last decade, much attention has been drawn towards devices that can harvest
vibration energy from the environment and have the potential to replace batteries in
handheld devices or wireless sensors. Most of the published works were focused on
only two approaches: the electromagnetic paradigm , and the piezoelectric paradigm .
However, these approaches all have to count on the springproof-mass design so their
performance is always limited to certain narrow bandwidth around the mechanical
resonant frequency, while natural harvestable vibration power spectrum usually spans
from low to ~100 Hz with higher energy in the low frequency end. To overcome
these fundamental problems, the third approach of electret power generators without
springs (hence no resonant frequency) emerged to have a major advantage of
broadband operation. For examples, Boland et al demonstrated the first liquid-rotor
Teflon AF electret power generator of 0.43 μW production with a 28Hz shaker .
Tsutsumino et al showed a linear solidrotor power generator of 37.7μW production
with a 20Hz shaker .

As for the electret material, different materials have been examined as electrets .
Teflon AF charged with a back-lighted thyratron was used in Boland et al’s work.
Tsutsumino et al discovered that CYTOP, an amorphous perfluoropolymer from
Asahi Glass Co., Ltd. can also work as an electret material . CYTOP has also been
demonstrated to be a better electret material than Teflon AF with higher charge
density . Taking this into consideration, we chose CYTOP as the electret material for
our device.

Just as the electromagnetic force can be used to generate electrical power, the
electrostatic force can also be used to convert mechanical energy into an electrical
form. Electromagnetic generators are used in large power stations because scaling
laws show them to be superior at larger sizes. However, on the micro-scale, the
Page | 1
electrostatic force becomes significant and so is suitable for electrical power
generation. There are several different methods of operation in which the electrostatic
force can be used to generate electrical energy. In this paper we discuss these
methods and their relative merits in terms of power density, the suitability of the
method to performing maximal power point tracking and difficulties of generator
fabrication.

Figure 1 Typical inertial generator arrangement

As can be seen from Figure 1, the system comprises an inertial proof mass, a spring
and two dampers. One of these dampers, the electrical damper De, represents the
conversion mechanism between kinetic energy and electrical energy, and the other
represents parasitic mechanical damping due to air damping and hysteresis losses in
the spring (Dp). As has been shown in [1], the amount of energy that can be
generated under specific operating conditions (the amplitude and frequency of the
input vibration), is heavily dependent on the strength of the electrical damping force.
In addition, as the operating conditions change, the damping force must be tuned to
allow the generator to continue to work at its peak effectiveness. In other words, the
generator must perform maximal power point tracking. One of the main design
decisions, therefore, is what type of transduction mechanism should be used.

Page | 2
 2. Transduction Types
There are essentially 2 transduction mechanisms that can be used to convert motion
into electrical energy. These are:
• Electromagnetic (E.M.)
• Electrostatic (E.S.)
Electromagnetic micro generators make use of permanent magnets moving in relative
to a coil, inducing a voltage, and thus causing current flow according to Faradays’
laws of induction. Electrostatic generators can make use of variable capacitor
structures, or piezoelectric materials. The choice of transducer type for a particular
generator application is made based on the following three main criteria:

• Scaling laws: Different quantities scale at different rates with size. An obvious
example is that volume scales with the cube of length but area only scales as the
square of length. In the same way, electrostatic forces and electromagnetic forces do
not scale at the same rate as size changes. Electromagnetic forces scale somewhere
between L 3 and L 4 . Electrostatic forces scale somewhere between L 1 and L 2 .
Therefore, electromagnetic transducers are likely to be better at large sizes and
electrostatic generators become superior once devices are miniaturized.

• MEMS compatibility: The potential for the enormous uptake of micro generator
powered devices means that they must be cheap to manufacture. They will always be
integrated with some sensing and data transmission electronics. As a consequence, a
very useful feature of a micro generator is its ability to be manufactured in large
numbers at low cost and that it can be easily integrated with electronics. It is
therefore beneficial if the generator can be made using MEMS
technology. Electrostatic transducers are often used as actuators in MEMS devices
and thus variable capacitance structures are readily integratable using standard micro
fabrication technology.

Page | 3
• Controllability: Large scale energy harvesting devices, such as PV panels and
wind turbines use maximal power point tracking techniques in order to harvest as
much energy as possible as operating conditions change. An important aspect of
micro generators is that in order to maintain a high degree of effectiveness, it should
be possible to apply maximal power point tracking techniques to these generators.
This can be done by altering the electromechanical damping coefficient De, either by
changing the load impedance (E.M. and E.S. generators) or by adapting the
polarization of the generator (E.S generators). In electrostatic generators this is
readily achieved by changing the pre‐charge on the capacitor.
• Electrostatic Transducers :
Having taken into account the above criteria, and bearing in mind that the ultimate
aim for energy‐ harvesting devices is that they can be further and further miniaturized
to power smaller and smaller devices, the electrostatic transducer provides a very
attractive approach. An electrostatic transducer uses the force between charges stored
on electrodes to couple the energy from the mechanical domain into the electric
domain. The charge separation Q on the electrodes depends on the potential
difference V between them through the constitutive equation of a capacitance: Q =
Cvar V. The capacitance, Cvar,is a function of the geometry of the electrodes and the
characteristics of the materials surrounding them,. As the mass moves over z(t), as
defined in Figure 1, the capacitance changes between Cmax and Cmin . The energy
that is extracted from the mechanical motion then depends on how the variable
capacitance is connected to the electronic circuitry. There are, in effect, two main
techniques which have been used to realise the electrostatic transducer
mechanism. These are switched systems and continuous systems. The different
methods of operation will now be described.

Page | 4
 3. Device Design
For electret power generators, the biggest issue is that they do require careful gap
control between the rotor and stator; otherwise, these devices lose performance
greatly . This stems from the fact that the two electrodes of the power generator are
placed in such a way that one is on the rotor and the other is on the stator, as shown in
Fig. 1, and the fact that power output depends on the capacitance between these two
electrodes.

To overcome this issue, we developed a new electret generator design that requires
no precise separation gap control and hence greatly simplify the packaging
requirement. The schematic of this design is shown in Fig. 2. The device is made of
two parts, the rotor and the stator. Both the two electrodes of the power generator are
placed on the stator. The rotor has simply floating metal strips with ½ of the spatial
frequency of the electrodes on the stator. The packaging is to simply fix the stator to a
container and put the rotor directly on top of the stator. The rotor and the stator are in
mechanical contact, where the electret material, CYTOP for our devices, serves as the
low-friction bearing.

Page | 5
 4. Device Fabrication
The device consists of two parts, the rotor and the stator. Fabrication of the rotor and
the stator started with a soda lime wafer. 1500-Angstron gold along with 200-
Angstron chromium was thermally evaporated onto the soda lime wafer and patterned
by photolithography and wet etching according to the design.

Figure 2. General design of an electret power generator

Figure 3. Schematics of the new electret power generator

Page | 6
The electrodes on the stator were 18mm long and 1mm wide with 50 μ m separation,
and they are connected alternately.
The electrodes on the rotor were floating metal strips with 1/2 of the spatial frequency
of the electrodes on the stator. CYTOP (CTL-809M), as purchased from Asahi Glass
Co., Ltd., was spin- coated on the stator at a speed of 1000 rpm for 20 seconds and
soft-baked at 100℃ for 30 minutes. This spin-coating process was repeated 7 times to
obtain 20-μm thick CYTOP film. Finally the CYTOP film was fully cured at 185℃ for
90 minutes. Fig. 3 shows the fabricated stator and rotor.













Figure 4. Fabricated devices: (a) the stator and (b) the rotor.



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

Page | 7
 
TABLE I. CONDITIONS OF CORONA CHARGING

Needle Voltage -6kV

Grid Voltage -600V

Temperature 100℃

Charging time 10 minutes

After fabrication, the CYTOP electret was charged by corona charging. The condition
of the corona- charging is listed in Table 1. The surface potential distribution after
charging is shown in Fig 4. The average surface potential is around -300V and the
average charge density is 0.5578mC/m2.

Page | 8
 5. Experimental Details
The stator was glued onto a CNC-machined acrylic container. All necessary wires
were soldered and the rotor was directly placed on top of the stator, as shown in Fig. 5.
Power generation experiments were performed using a shielded box mounted to
Labworks Inc. ET-132-2 electrodynamic shaker, which was driven sinusoidally by a
HP33120A function generator through a power amplifier. The acceleration of the
power generator was measured using an Endevco256HX-10 accelerometer. The
shaking frequency was varied from 10Hz to 100Hz. The micro electret power
generator was connected to a resistive load and the voltage across the load was
measured from a National Semiconductor LF356N op-amp used as a 1012Ohm input
impedance voltage buffer.


Figure 5. Distribution of surface potential after charging. (The red part is the area
outside the device)

Page | 9
 

Figure 6. Testing setup

6. Results and Discussion

As expected, the power generated depends on the load resistance and the driving
frequency. Due to the capacitive nature of this device, there is an optimal load for the
optimal power generation. Fig. 6 shows the power output versus load resistance at
different driving frequencies. From the graph, it follows that the optimal load
resistance is 40-50MΩ. Using this optimal 40MΩload resistance, the maximum power
generated was 2.267μW at 60 Hz. The time trace is shown in Fig. 7.
The relative low power output, compared to that of Ref, can be attributed to the
relatively low efficiency of corona charging. Under the same condition, the surface
potential after charging was merely around -300V, while that of Ref was around -
1000V. Another possible cause would be that the rotor and stator plates are not
perfectly flat and contact each other perfectly, leaving some air gaps in certain area.
Further work is underway to boost the power output.

Page | 10
 

Figure 7. Power output versus load resistance at different frequencies

Figure 8. Time trace of power output at 60Hz with load resistance of 40MΩ.

Page | 11
 7. Conclusions
We have developed a simple micro electret power generator using CYTOP as the
electret material. The micro power generator requires neither precise gap control nor
complex packaging. The maximum power output obtained is 2.267 μ W at 60 Hz
with load resistance of 40MΩ.

Further work is underway to boost power output as well as to integrate the device
into other portable systems.
To date, the micro generator community has concentrated its work with a relatively
even distribution on each of the three main transducer types, electrostatic,
electromagnetic and piezoelectric generators. However, as micro generators become
further and further miniaturised, the requirements for MEMS compatibility
increase. In addition, due to the nature of the scaling of electrostatic and
electromagnetic forces, at some level of miniaturisation, the electromagnetic force will
become weaker than the electrostatic force and thus electrostatic micro generators will
be able to achieve greater power densities. Therefore, it is likely that in medical
applications, where it is necessary to implant self‐ powered sensors into the human
body, electrostatic generators are likely to dominate. So far, there have been three
main types of electrostatic micro generators presented, these being the constant voltage
and constant charge switched type and the electret based continuous type. The
switched types are more easily controlled to perform maximal power point tracking,
but have the added complexity of the associated circuitry to control those switches. In
addition, constant charge designs are preferable when a large electrostatic force is
required in the application.

Page | 12
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