Analyses of Power Output of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Devices Directly Connected to a Resistive Load Using a Coupled Piezoelectric-Circuit Finite Element Method Meiling Zhu, Emma Worthington and James Njuguna Department of Materials, Department of Sustainable Systems Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, MK43 0AL UK Abstract A coupled piezoelectric-circuit finite element model (CPC-FEM) is ...

This paper presents a micro-scale air flow sensor based on a free-standingcantilever structure. In the fabrication process, MEMS techniques are used to deposit asilicon nitride layer on a silicon wafer. A platinum layer is deposited on the silicon nitridelayer to form a piezoresistor, and the resulting structure is then etched to create afreestanding micro-cantilever. When an air flow passes ov...

The polymer piezoelectric polvinylidene fluoride has found widespread use in sensors and actuators. The bending mode of piezoelectricity offers very high sensitivities and low mechanical input impedance, but has not been studied in as much detail for sensor applications. We report the dynamic electromechanical properties of millimeter size cantilevers made from electroded films of PVF2. All dev...

We have examined a piezoelectric unimorph cantilever (PUC) with unequal piezoelectric and nonpiezoelectric lengths for vibration energy harvesting theoretically by extending the analysis of a PUC with equal piezoelectric and nonpiezoelectric lengths. The theoretical approach was validated by experiments. A case study showed that for a fixed vibration frequency, the maximum open-circuit induced ...

This research seeks to develop a novel branch of materials systems called Distributed Intelligent Materials Systems (DIMS) which incorporate actuation, sensing, electronics and intelligence as inherent parts of the material structure. A microcantilever optical switch is fabricated as a concept demonstrator with Gallium nitride (GaN) as host material. GaN has several material characteristics whi...

Title of dissertation: ADVANTAGEOUS UTILIZATION OF NONLINEAR PHENOMENA IN MICRO-STRUCTURES AND MACRO-STRUCTURES Andrew James Dick, Doctor of Philosophy, 2007 Dissertation directed by: Professor Balakumar Balachandran and Professor C. Daniel Mote, Jr. Department of Mechanical Engineering Within this work, the nonlinear oscillations of various beam-like structures are studied. Methods are develop...

Design of experiments and multiphysics analyses were used to develop a parametric model for a d33-based cantilever. The analysis revealed that the most significant parameters influencing the resonant frequency are the supporting layer thickness, piezoelectric layer thickness, and cantilever length. On the other hand, the most important factors affecting the charge output are the piezoelectric t...

The effect of the temperature variation on a unimorph piezoelectric cantilever is studied. Its influences on the thermal expansion, the piezoelectric constant, the transient part and the creep are experimentally analyzed. Afterwards, a H∞ controller is synthesized in order to reject the thermal disturbance and to reach performances required in micromanipulation. Finally, the closed-loop experim...

-In this paper, piezoelectric actuation is compared with electrostatic actuation for application in RF-MEMS switches with respect to actuation voltage and technological implementation. The expression for the actuation voltages of electrostatic and piezoelectric actuation are discussed and compared with respect to scaling. Calculation examples show actuation voltages for a cantilever beam of 1μm...

Energy harvesting from vibration for low-power electronics has been investigated intensively in recent years, but rotational energy harvesting is less investigated and still has some challenges. In this paper, a methodology for low-speed rotational energy harvesting using piezoelectric transduction and frequency up-conversion is analysed. The system consists of a piezoelectric cantilever beamwi...