Faraday For Fun: An Electronic Batteryless Dice

Step 4 Voltage Generator Performance

How well does the muscle power voltage generator work? Here are some oscilloscope screen shots. With gentle shakes, the generator provides about 15V peak to peak. The short circuit current is about 680mA. Quite sufficient for this project.

Comments

[50h9j]

This sounds impressive, but I am worried that the 15V is measured on an oscilloscope with high impedance and the current is measured on a short circuit, i.e. very low impedance. This flatters both measurements and gives no indication of actual power produced, particularly not sustained or average power over the cycle.
I have been looking at student wavepower converters that use such devices and I can't help thinking they are very low efficiency. This is reinforced by not finding any commercially designed machines with Faraday linear generators, of whatever they are called.
I would be interested if you could estimate the mechanical power input to your device and the electrical power output and come up with an efficiency. One way would be to power the device from an electric motor and mechanism of known efficiency.