• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.85-94
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• 2013

Recently, researches of piezoelectric energy harvesting were tried and in this study, a piezoelectric energy harvesting clothes was developed. First, piezoelectric energy harvesting zone on the extremities were drawn by 3D motion capturing and as a result, the hip, the elbow, and the knee were determined. A new structure of piezoelectric harvester was developed for appling to clothes. Because it needed to be flexible and sensitive for human body, the 2 layer stacked structure was proposed. A prototype of seamless garment was designed for a harvesting clothes because it needed to be body-tight and not to restrict the movement. High peak-to-peak voltages were acquired from the energy harvesting clothes.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.22 no.11
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• pp.918-924
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• 2009

In this paper, we designed micro-structured electromagnetic transducers for energy harvesting and verified the performance of proposed transducers using finite element analysis software, COMSOL Multiphysics. To achieve higher energy transduce efficiency, around the magnetic core material, three-dimensional micro-coil structures with high number of turns are fabricated using semiconductor fabrication process technologies. To find relations between device size and energy transduce efficiency, generated electrical power values of seven different sizes of transducers ($3{\times}3\;mm^2$, $6{\times}6\;mm^2$, $9{\times}9\;mm^2$, $12{\times}12\;mm^2$, $15{\times}15\;mm^2$, $18{\times}18\;mm^2$, and $21{\times}21\;mm^2$) are analyzed on various magnetic flux density environment ranging from 0.84 T to 1.54 T and it showed that size of $15{\times}15\;mm^2$ device can generate $991.5\;{\mu}W$ at the 8 Hz of environmental kinetic energy. Compare to other electromagnetic energy harvesters, proposed system showed competitive performance in terms of power generation, operation bandwidth and size. Since proposed system can generate electric power at very low frequency of kinetic energy from typical life environment including walking and body movement, it is expected that proposed system can be effectively applied to various pervasive computing applications including power source of embodied medical equipment, power source of RFID sensors and etc. as an secondary power sources.