Energy Harvesting From Arrays of Long Barium Titanate Nanowires

Abstract

In this paper, a piezoelectric nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) is fabricated using newly developed ultra-long (∼45μm) aligned barium titanate (BaTiO3) nanowire (NW) arrays that exhibit piezoelectric behavior for harvesting mechanical vibrational energy. The novel BaTiO3 NW NEMS is fabricated to have resonance at frequencies below 500 Hz for efficient energy harvesting since ambient mechanical vibrations typically exists in the 1 Hz to 1 kHz range. The maximum AC power harvested from the BaTiO3 NEMS is evaluated by impedance matching at resonant frequency. In addition, NEMS energy harvester comprised of seedless solution grown aligned ZnO NW arrays is also fabricated and direct vibration excitation experiments are performed to determine the peak AC power at optimal load resistor. Here, we clearly report the superior power harvesting capability from long ferroelectric BaTiO3 NW arrays than semiconducting ZnO NWs for the same electrode area when excited with the same sinusoidal base acceleration of 1g RMS at resonant frequency.