Dielectric Elastomer Vibration Power Generation Using Cockcroft–Walton Type Circuit

Abstract

In recent years, IoT devices have become widespread for collecting big data, and the use of the energy harvesting using environmental vibration as a power source has attracted increasing attention. In this research, we propose a circuit for the dielectric elastomer power generator (DEG) to be used for a low voltage source. The proposed circuit, called the CW-DEG, is constructed from the 1-stage Cockcroft-Walton circuit with the AC voltage source replaced by the DEGs. Although the DEGs operated at a high voltage, the proposed circuit outputs the difference of the DEG voltages and does not require step-down by a Zener diode. We first derive the charge increment of the charging capacitor over a cycle and show that it can be approximated by a simple function of the magnitude change of the DEG capacitance. A numerical example shows that the proposed circuit produces higher charging capacitor voltage compared to a conventional self-priming DEG (SP-DEG) setup with a Zener diode.