Design and Analysis of Square Hole based MEMS Piezoelectric Energy Harvester using PiezoMUMPs Process

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient way to improve the performance of the MEMS piezoelectric energy harvester by incorporating square shaped through hole to the classical cantilever configuration. The design constraints w.r.t PiezoMUMPs fabrication process for this particular square hole based topology have been discussed. The harvester characteristics such as voltage, power, resonant frequency, stress and strain profile has been studied for different configurations. In this work, the resonant frequency has been improved by decreasing the stiffness of the harvester without increasing the mass of the beam. It is observed that not only resonant frequency reduces but also the voltage and power of the piezoelectric energy harvester increases due to the effect of hole. The square hole based piezo harvester produces 1.1 μW whereas the without hole based harvester produces only 131 nW for the overall harvester dimension of (1250 μm × 250μm).