Piezoelectric MEMS for energy harvesting
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Introduction The vast and continuing reduction in the size and power consumption of sensors and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) circuitry has led to a focused research effort on onboard power sources that can replace batteries. The concern with batteries has been that they must be charged before use. Similarly, sensors and data acquisition components in distributed networks require centralized energy sources for their operation. In applications such as sensors for structural health monitoring in remote locations, geographically inaccessible temperature or humidity sensors and battery charging or replacement operations can be tedious and expensive. The need to replace batteries in a large-scale sensor network can be problematic and costly and is nearly impossible in hazardous, harsh, and large terrain deployment. An example would be embedded sensor networks in urban battlefields. Logically, the emphasis in such cases has been on developing on-site generators that can transform any available form of energy at that location into electrical energy.1 Recent advances in low-power very
large-scale integration design have enabled ultrasmall power integrated circuits, which can run with only tens of nW to hundreds of μW of power.2 This scaling trend has opened the door for on-chip energy harvesting solutions, eliminating the need for chemical batteries or complex wiring for microsensors, thus forming the foundation for battery-less autonomous sensors and network systems. An alternative to conventional batteries as the power supply is to make use of the parasitic energy available locally in the environment. Unused energy is produced by industrial machines, human activity, vehicles, structures, and environment sources, which could be excellent sources for capturing small amounts of power without affecting the source itself. In recent years, several energy harvesting approaches have been proposed using solar, thermoelectric, electromagnetic, piezoelectric, and capacitive schemes at the meso-, micro-, and nanoscales.1,3,4 These can be simply classified into two categories: (1) energy harvesting for sensor and communication networks using a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS)/thin-film
Sang-Gook Kim, Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Cambridge, MA; [email protected] Shashank Priya, Center for Energy Harvesting Materials and Systems, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA; [email protected] Isaku Kanno, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kobe University, Japan; [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/mrs.2012.275
© 2012 Materials Research Society
MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 37 • NOVEMBER 2012 • www.mrs.org/bulletin
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PIEZOELECTRIC MEMS FOR ENERGY HARVESTING
approach, and (2) energy harvesting for other electronic devices using bulk devices. This article mainly focuses on small-scale power energy harvesting techniques (∼1–100 μW) using the MEMS/thin-film approach for the self-supported operation of portable or embedded microdevices and systems. Further, we focus on mechanical vibration energy as the prime source for gen
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