Comparative Analysis of Wrist-worn Energy Harvesting Architectures

This paper reports the simulation-based analysis of six dynamical structures with respect to their wrist-worn vibration energy harvesting capability. This work approaches the problem of maximizing energy harvesting potential at the wrist by considering multiple mechanical substructures independently of any specific transduction mechanism; rotational and linear motion-based architectures are considered. The addition of a linear spring element to the structures has the potential to improve power output. The analysis concludes that a sprung rotational harvester architecture outperforms a sprung linear architecture by 58% when real walking data is used as input to the simulations. The power output of a rotational prototype device was measured for various inputs and compared against simulation in order to corroborate the rotational device model.