Design and performance of a small-scale wind turbine exploiting an electret-based electrostatic conversion

This paper reports on a cm-scale wind turbine coupled to an electret-based electrostatic energy converter for airflows energy harvesting. The device we propose is made of a typical axial turbine to convert the wind energy into a mechanical energy of rotation and of a patterned electret-based electrostatic converter to turn this mechanical energy into electricity. This is actually the first time that the mechanical power extracted by a turbine is turned into electricity with an electret-based electrostatic converter. Several prototypes have been tested on a wind tunnel from 0 to 10 m s; a power of 200 μW has been extracted on a 4 cm-diameter device at 10 m s.