Electrical waveforms from vibrational energy harvesters: A trilateral measurement comparison

Abstract

The traceable measurement of the output signals of vibrational energy harvesters is needed in any determination of their electromechanical energy conversion properties. These signals have highly distorted waveforms, for which conventional meters show poor measurement performance. In the framework of the EMRP 2009 Metrology for energy harvesting project we realized three different meters, based on two strongly different measurement principles (ac-dc thermal transfer, and sampling) and performed a comparison of the methods; a summary of the experimental implementations and the results of the comparison are here reported.