| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5008542 | Sensors and Actuators A: Physical | 2016 | 8 Pages |
â¢Material synthesized by sol-gel and inexpensive spin coating method for thin film deposition.â¢The best feasible design of Energy Harvester based on tapered beam with varying cross section.â¢Use of biocompatible and green materials i.e. ZnO , PDMS & silver fabric to make it compatible with wearable electronics.â¢Fabrication of Low cost vibration exciter deployed during characterization.
The Energy harvesting (EH) technologies are receiving significant interest due to realization of 'zero-power' wireless sensors and Internet-of-Things (IoT). Power consumption of current milli-scale commercial node has an average consumption of 0.1-1000 μW which has made self powered sensor nodes a reality. Zinc oxide (ZnO) a green piezoelectric material has been spun in x-y plane and injected along z direction using syringe on flexible tapered beam of varying cross section. A energy harvester fabricated in this study consists of layers of PDMS/Ag/ZnO/Ag/PDMS where Ag(silver) fabric used as parallel plate electrodes and also extended for external interfaces. Wearable energy harvester is feasible due to use of biocompatible materials. The XRD results show that ZnO deposited has crystalline structure. The performance of the energy harvester is validated by numerical simulations and detail electrical characterization. The electrical characterization results show that measured power density of the device is 10 μW/mm3. A comparison with prior published results of flexible EH shows that the device performance is very good with added advantage of biocompatibility. In addition, novel structure of vibration exciter using woofer diaphragm has been fabricated and deployed as vibration source during characterization.
