Design methodology for application-specific electromagnetic energy harvesters

For energy harvesters to be used efficiently, they have to be adapted to the respective application. For kinetic excitations, electromagnetic harvesters are very promising as they allow a high degree of freedom in the design which in turn permits optimally adapted designs. A corresponding design methodology has been developed in a current research project. It is implemented as a design tool in MATLAB®, which performs an automated comparison between different basic structures. Prior to presenting first results of these structural comparisons, the general structure of the design process is explained. It is shown that the application-specific requirements are most important for the evaluation of the basic structures.