Recent development in lead-free perovskite piezoelectric bulk materials

Energy harvesting technologies have been explored by researchers for more than two decades as an alternative to conventional power sources (e.g. batteries) for small-sized and low-power electronic devices. The limited life-time and necessity for periodic recharging or replacement of batteries has been a consistent issue in portable, remote, and implantable devices. Ambient energy can usually be found in the form of solar energy, thermal energy, and vibration energy. Amongst these energy sources, vibration energy presents a persistent presence in nature and manmade structures. Various materials and transduction mechanisms have the ability to convert vibratory energy to useful electrical energy, such as piezoelectric, electromagnetic, and electrostatic generators. Piezoelectric transducers, with their inherent electromechanical coupling and high power density compared to electromagnetic and electrostatic transducers, have been widely explored to generate power from vibration energy sources. A topical review of piezoelectric energy harvesting methods was carried out and published in this journal by the authors in 2007. Since 2007, countless researchers have introduced novel materials, transduction mechanisms, electrical circuits, and analytical models to improve various aspects of piezoelectric energy harvesting devices. Additionally, many researchers have also reported novel applications of piezoelectric energy harvesting technology in the past decade. While the body of literature in the field of piezoelectric energy harvesting has grown significantly since 2007, this paper presents an update to the authors' previous review paper by summarizing the notable developments in the field of piezoelectric energy harvesting through the past decade.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-665X/ab36e4/pdf

A review of energy harvesting using piezoelectric materials: state-of-the-art a decade later (2008–2018)

With the growing number of deployments of Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure for a wide variety of applications, the battery maintenance has become a major limitation for the sustainability of such infrastructure. To overcome this problem, energy harvesting offers a viable alternative to autonomously power IoT devices, resulting in a number of battery-less energy harvesting IoTs (or EH-IoTs) appearing in the market in recent years. Standards activities are also underway, which involve wireless protocol design suitable for EH-IoTs as well as testing procedures for various energy harvesting methods. Despite the early commercial and standards activities, IoT sensing, computing and communications under unpredictable power supply still face significant research challenges. This paper systematically surveys recent advances in EH-IoTs from several perspectives. First, it reviews the recent commercial developments for EH-IoT in terms of both products and services, followed by initial standards activities in this space. Then it surveys methods that enable the use of energy harvesting hardware as a proxy for conventional sensors to detect contexts in energy efficient manner. Next it reviews the advancements in efficient checkpointing and timekeeping for intermittently powered IoT devices. We also survey recent research in novel wireless communication techniques for EH-IoTs, such as the applications of reinforcement learning to optimize power allocations on-the-fly under unpredictable energy productions, and packet-less IoT communications and backscatter communication techniques for energy impoverished environments. The paper is concluded with a discussion of future research directions.

Sensing, Computing, and Communication for Energy Harvesting IoTs: A Survey

Piezoelectric MEMS vibrational energy harvesters: Advances and outlook

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) converting mechanical energy into electrical energy have received much attention because of their huge potential applications for supplying power to electronic devices. Improving the performance of TENGs has become a research hot point because of their output limited current. In this paper, we propose a flexible single-electrode triboelectric nanogenerator based on porous Na2CO3/polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) structure to enhance the triboelectric performance for nanogenerators. To compare their output performance, NaCl and sugar are normally used as sacrificial template for triboelectric nanogenerator. As an experimental result, the nanogenerator based on porous Na2CO3/PDMS structure obtains the open-circuit voltage of 125 V and maximum output current of 100 μA, which are higher than that generated by NaCl/PDMS and sugar/PDMS TENGs. And the generated electric energy of Na2CO3/PDMS TENG could instantaneously power 42 commercial light-emitting diodes without any energy storage devices. This developed porous Na2CO3/PDMS TENG could open a new application field for self-powered personal electronics because of its flexibility, simple manufacturing process, and the ability to harvest mechanical energy from human motions.

Flexible Single-Electrode Triboelectric Nanogenerator and Body Moving Sensor Based on Porous Na2CO3/Polydimethylsiloxane Film.

This paper presents a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) piezoelectric power generator array for vibration energy harvesting. A complete design flow of the vibration-based energy harvester using the finite element method (FEM) is proposed. The modal analysis is selected to calculate the resonant frequency of the harvester, and harmonic analysis is performed to investigate the influence of the geometric parameters on the output voltage. Based on simulation results, a MEMS Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) cantilever array with an integrated large Si proof mass is designed and fabricated to improve output voltage and power. Test results show that the fabricated generator, with five cantilever beams (with unit dimensions of about 3 × 2.4 × 0.05 mm3) and an individual integrated Si mass dimension of about 8 × 12.4 × 0.5 mm3, produces a output power of 66.75 μW, or a power density of 5.19 μW∙mm-3∙g-2 with an optimal resistive load of 220 kΩ from 5 m/s2 vibration acceleration at its resonant frequency of 234.5 Hz. In view of high internal impedance characteristic of the PZT generator, an efficient autonomous power conditioning circuit, with the function of impedance matching, energy storage and voltage regulation, is then presented, finding that the efficiency of the energy storage is greatly improved and up to 64.95%. The proposed self-supplied energy generator with power conditioning circuit could provide a very promising complete power supply solution for wireless sensor node loads.

/pdf/a-vibration-based-mems-piezoelectric-energy-harvester-and-ofe75dr7tc.pdf

Licheng Deng

Papers

A vibration-based MEMS piezoelectric energy harvester and power conditioning circuit.