DEVELOPMENT OF A NON-INVASIVE RESPIRATORY ENERGY HARVESTER USING TRIBOELECTRIC EFFECTVasandani, Paresh (2017) DEVELOPMENT OF A NON-INVASIVE RESPIRATORY ENERGY HARVESTER USING TRIBOELECTRIC EFFECT. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh. (Unpublished) This is the latest version of this item.
AbstractThe need to recharge and eventually replace batteries is increasingly significant for operating a variety of wearable electronic devices. Rapid advances in the functions of electronic devices have stimulated the requirements for portable and sustainable power sources, thus opening the possibility of using human biomechanical energy as a promising alternative power source. Respiration is a unique form of spontaneous and stable source of human biomechanical energy that is currently untapped, and has the potential to be converted to a sustainable power source for low power wearable electronic devices and integrated body sensor networks. However, effectively harvesting respiration energy characterized by low frequency and low force, is currently a technological challenge, and cannot be well-achieved by classical energy harvesting methods. In this work, a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) is demonstrated as a small and light-weight wearable respiratory energy harvester (wREH), capable of tracking rate and depth of respiration, and can be utilized as a self-powered respiratory motion sensor. Although TENGs have been demonstrated as a promising technology for mechanical energy harvesting, they have a high inherent impedance which poses a major challenge to their effective integration with electronic systems for practical applications. The high inherent impedance creates a huge mismatch when TENGs are directly integrated with energy storage devices that usually have low impedance, resulting in low energy conversion efficiency. This problem is generally treated by power management circuits which have a limited effect. In this work, a synchronous switching approach is developed, which has been shown to enhance the TENG output energy by over a factor of two and lower the optimum load resistance, from megaohms to ohms. Contact electrification in a TENG occurs only when two dissimilar triboelectric surfaces are contacted. However, there exists no theoretical relationship between contact force and triboelectric charge transfer in TENGs. Accordingly, a charge-force relationship is presented by combining the theories of contact electrification and contact mechanics, which successfully explains the tendency of charge transfer. Furthermore, a method to design simulation experiments to predict the TENG output within an order of magnitude using its structural parameters, is presented as an effective design tool. Share
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