Design and development of cantilever-type MEMS based piezoelectric energy harvester

Vibration energy harvesting is gaining attention due to abundance of vibration energy at most places and ability to generate power MEMS devices from microwatts to few millwatts. Piezoelectric energy harvesters are the most suitable for vibration energy harvesting due to simplicity in design, operation and fabrication in MEMS technology. Cantilever fixed from one end and seismic mass on the free end is used to harvest energy which is modeled as spring mass damper system responding to a single frequency. Wideband frequency operation for the energy harvester must be ensured so that power is harvested for a range of frequency. In this paper cantilever array with variable length from 2000 μm to 2200 μm is designed and simulated at a boundary load of 1 bar pressure to achieve a wideband frequency operation from 681 Hz to 1215 Hz.