Design and Optimization of Piezoelectric MEMS Vibration Energy Harvesters Based on Genetic Algorithm

Low-power electronic applications are normally powered by batteries, which have to deal with stringent lifetime and size constraints. To enhance operational autonomy, energy harvesting from ambient vibration by microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) has been identified as a vivid solution to this universal problem. This paper proposes an automated design and optimization methodology with minimum human efforts for MEMS-based piezoelectric energy harvesters. The analytic equations for estimating the harvested voltage by the unimorph piezoelectric energy harvesters are presented with their accuracy validated by using the finite element method (FEM) simulation and prototype measurement. Thanks to their high accuracy, we use these analytic equations as fitness functions of genetic algorithm (GA), an evolutionary computation method for optimization problems by mimicking biological evolution. Our experimental results show that the GA is capable of optimizing multiple physical parameters of piezoelectric energy harvesters to considerably enhance the output voltage. This harvesting efficiency improvement is also desirably coupled with physical size reduction as preferred for the MEMS design process. To demonstrate capability of the proposed optimization method, we have also included a commercial optimization product (i.e., COMSOL optimization module) in our comparison study. The experiments show that our proposed GA-based optimization methodology offers higher effectiveness in the magnitude improvement of harvested voltage along with less runtime compared with the other optimization approaches. Furthermore, the effects of geometry optimization on mechanical and electrical properties (e.g., resonant frequency, stiffness, and internal impedance) are also studied and an effective solution to producing maximum power from unimorph piezoelectric harvesters is proposed.