EFFECT OF COIL WIRE GAUGE IN ELECTROMAGNETIC POWER HARVESTERS

This work investigates the optimal coil wire gauge for an electro magnetic power harvester. Theoretically, the power harvested increases proportionally with the radius of the coil wire. However, the magnitude of the voltage induced is proportional to the inverse of the coil radius. A mesoscale (6.5cm 3 , 21grams) prototype device was built and tested to verify this theory. The prototype with 22awg wire generated 1.1mW of RMS power and 12mV peak voltage for an excitation of 0.25G at resonance. The exact same design with 32awg wire generated only 0.4mW of power but a peak voltage of 50mV.