Copper mesh electrodes based energy harvester

Abstract

With advent of microelectronics, power requirement is reduced to greater extend which makes microsystems self powered. Hence, Energy Harvesting domain becomes center of attraction of worldwide researchers. It is possible to harvest the energy from the ambient sources which are freely available in surrounding and use this harvested energy to power the miniaturized devices which require microwatt power. Since, human body parts like finger, brachial, ankle are curved in nature thus flexible harvester is proposed in order to mesh with human body parts. Human motions are often complicated and a periodic. Capturing the vibrations and harvesting the energy from those vibrations is the need of hour. The proposed harvester with copper meshed electrodes and Zinc oxide (ZnO) as piezoelectric material was fabricated by simple and inexpensive spin coating method. Copper has been the material of choice for electrodes because of its exceptional electrical conductivity and availability. The measured electric potential of the proposed harvester was 0.65 volts at a resonance frequency of 41 Hz and array is proposed for more electric potential and power.