Arrayed liquid rotor electret power generator systems

Abstract

We report our work on liquid rotor electret power generators (LEPG), LEPG devices are essentially fixed-charged, Teflon-electret capacitors with air-filled gaps and liquid droplets that move by vibration. As the liquid moves into and out of the gaps, a net voltage is generated across the capacitor as image charges on the electrodes redistribute according to the position of the droplets. In this work, we also study serial and parallel arrays of LEPG power generators to increase power output. Power output from parallel arrays scales linearly with number of devices, as expected, to produce power output up to about 10 μW. Our initial results show that series arrays need to be studied more because they involve more complicated impedance matching issues.

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