The study of the applications of piezoelectric materials in the active vibration control of flexible structures has been ongoing for more than a decade. Based on the Linear Quadratic Gauss (LQG) optimal control method, the paper introduces an effective procedure to suppress the vibration of flexible structures with the sensors/actuators are symmetrically collocated on both sides of the same pos...

The power generation capacity of piezoelectric energy harvesters (PEHs) is not only related to the properties of the piezoelectric material, the vibration magnitude and the subsequent conditioning circuit, but also to the fixation modes and adjustment methods. In this paper, a commercial piezoelectric ceramic plate (PCP) in simply supported beam fixation mode and cantilever beam fixation mode w...

Research into energy harvesting from ambient vibration sources has attracted great interest over the last few years, largely as a result of advances in the areas of wireless technology and low-power electronics. One of the mechanisms for converting mechanical vibration to electrical energy is the use of piezoelectric materials, typically operating as a cantilever in a bending mode, which genera...

The development of energy harvesting devices with piezoelectric transducers has been widely studied in the last decade. Most of previous studies considered a resonant cantilever beam with an attached tip mass and focused on the proper modeling of the cantilever device, design and optimization of electric harvesting circuit and nonlinear amplification of resonant vibration amplitude. However, fe...

Recently, the strain state of a piezoelectric electrode has been found to impact the electrochemical activity taking place between the piezoelectric material and its solution environment. This effect, dubbed piezocatalysis, is prominent in piezoelectric materials because the strain state and electronic state of these materials are strongly coupled. Herein we develop a general theoretical analys...

Piezoelectric micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) loudspeakers are drawing more interest due to their applications in new-developing audio technologies. MEMS devices’ small dimensions necessitate including thermal and viscous effects the surrounding air when simulating behaviors. Thus, linearized mass, momentum energy conservation equations used describe these effects. These formulations imp...

The vibration analysis is an important step in the design and optimization of microsensors. In most of the cases, COMSOL software is employed to consider the size-dependency on the dynamic behavior in the MEMS sensors. In this paper, the Modified Couple Stress Theory (MCST) is used to capture the size effect on dynamic behavior in a microsensor with two layers of the silicon and piezoelectric. ...

Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesters have demonstrated the potential for sustainable generation from diverse ambient sources in context of low-powered micro-scale systems. However, challenges remain concerning harvesting more power low-frequency input excitations and broadband random excitations. To address this, here we propose a purely mechanical approach by employing inertial amplifiers...

The static pull-in instability of beam-type micro-electromechanical systems is theoretically investigated. Two engineering cases including cantilever and double cantilever micro-beam are considered. Considering the mid-plane stretching as the source of the nonlinearity in the beam behavior, a nonlinear size-dependent Euler-Bernoulli beam model is used based on a modified couple stress theory, c...

The fabrication and characterization of SiGeC cantilever microcoolers are described. Silicon on insulator (SOI) was used as the substrate, and two layers of 3 μm p-SiGe0.07C0.0075 and 1.14 μm n-SiGe0.07C0.0075 lattice matched to silicon were grown using molecular beam epitaxy. The uni couple cooler was fabricated using conventional integrated circuit (IC) processing, and the cantilever structur...