State-of-the-art in vibration-based electrostatic energy harvesting

Recently, embedded systems and wireless sensor nodes have been gaining importance. For operating these devices several vibration-based energy harvesters have been successfully developed and reported, such as piezoelectric, electromagnetic, and electrostatic energy harvesters (EEHs). This paper presents the state-of-the-art in the field of vibration-based EEHs. Mainly, two types of EEHs, electret-free and electret-based, are reported in the literature. The developed EEHs are mostly of the centimeter scale. These energy harvesters, with resonant frequencies ranging from 2 Hz to 1.7 kHz, when subjected to excitation on the order of 0.25 g to 14.2 g, generate power that ranges from 0.46 nW to 2.1 mW.