Self-Powered Kinetic Energy Harvesters for Seek-Induced Vibrations in Hard Disk Drives

Abstract

Energy harvesters with battery charging circuitry, which collect wasted kinetic energy from a magnetic disk drive's rotary actuator seek operations and flexible cable vibrations, are proposed, prototyped and presented in this paper. Depending on a disk drive's form factor and seek format, it is suggested by the present study that the harvested energy can be optimized by tuning the harvester's natural frequencies to major frequency content in the rotary actuator's excitation. It is demonstrated in this study that with prototype energy harvester systems, one can easily light up a regular LED. The work presented in this paper has implications in energy saving and recycling wasted mechanical energy for other low-power electronic applications in magnetic disk drive storage devices.

Keywords

• energy harvester
• hdd
• kinetic energy
• self-power device
• seek-induced vibrations
• rotary actuator.