Application of low temperature co-fire ceramics on in-plane micro-generator

This study presents a new method of fabrication of in-plane rotary electromagnetic micro-generator. Low temperature co-fired ceramics (LTCC) technology is applied to fabricate micro-coil for the micro-generator. The process of the LTCC micro-coil provides more cost-effective and time-saving approaches than other process such as Lithographie Galvanoformung Abformung (LIGA), LIGA-like and filament-winding methods. This micro-generator consists of multilayer planar LTCC silver (Ag) micro-coil and multipolar hard magnets of Nd/Fe/B (neodymium, iron, and boron). This study focuses on the fabrication and test of the in-plane micro-generator to obtain a high power output. There are three different configurations of planar LTCC Ag micro-coils investigated in this study, which are sector-shaped, circle-shaped, and square-shaped micro-coils. Both the printing linewidth and spacing of these micro-coils are 100 μm. The multipolar hard magnet Nd/Fe/B with outer diameter of 9 mm and thickness of 700 μm is molded and sintered. The self-designed measurement facility of the power output is established, which consists of a drive mechanism and data acquisition units. A prototype of the micro-generator is as small as 9 mm × 9 mm × 1 mm in volume size. The experimental results show that the micro-generator with sector-shaped micro-coil has the highest power output of 1.89 mW, and the effective value of the induced voltage of 205.7 mV at 888.3 Hz (about 13,325 rpm) is achieved.