コッククロフト・ウォルトン型回路を用いた誘電エラストマー振動発電

抄録

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.