Since the start of this decade large efforts have been put into research towards alternative miniature energy sources for mobile and autonomous applications. Extracting energy from the environment provides an attractive way to power the application within a minimal volume. MEMS technology offers the means to design an efficient and small energy harvester, at a minimum cost. Our aim is to utilise these harvesters as micro-generator in low-power autonomous sensor nodes, where they can replace batteries as energy sources. Mechanical energy is abundantly available in the environment as vibrations are produced by a myriad of (industrial) equipment and machines [1]. Generating electrical power from these mechanical vibrations is typically done using either electro-magnetic, piezo-electric or electrostatic transduction. In this contribution the design of an electrostatic vibration harvester is presented, a prototype has been produced and tested. This work deals with the continuation of previously presented research [2]. It presents our latest fabrication and characterisation results of the electrostatic vibration energy harvester. The device presented in this work is a resonant, MEMS-based, in-plane, variable overlap capacitor using an electret as polarisation source. The devices are designed to use mechanical vibrations produced by industrial machines in the regime up to 4 kHz.
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