High-voltage micro-plasma switch for efficient power management of triboelectric kinetic energy harvesters

As for any electrostatic transducer, triboelectric energy generators (TENGs) need to maximize their bias voltage for a good kinetic-to-electrical energy conversion. If several hundreds of volts can be obtained directly by triboelectric contacts for some state-of-art devices, unstable charge-pump (UCP) conditioning circuits can also be used to reach such high values with more basic TENGs. Whatever the chosen solution, this high-voltage must be reduced to a few volts to power an electronic device. In this abstract, we first compare the three main UCPs and we propose to use an autonomous MEMS micro-plasma switch in a Buck DC-DC converter in order to maximized the voltage across the TENG while obtaining a low voltage rectified output without any external control.