The Fabrication of Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvester Arrays Based on AlN Thin Film

Abstract

This paper describes the fabrication and measurement results of piezoelectric energy harvester arrays based on aluminum nitride (AlN) as a piezoelectric material. The AlN piezoelectric thin film with crystal orientation (002) and crystal orientation (101) is deposited respectively by pulsed_DC sputtering on the different bottom electrode materials. Based on the AlN thin film, the piezoelectric vibration energy harvester arrays with 5 cantilever beams were developed. Then the load characteristics, frequency characteristics, harvester connected in series and parallel properties of harvester were investigated. In addition, we compare the properties of piezoelectric vibration energy harvester arrays with crystal orientation (101) and (002), where a record max power output of 0.23 μW and 0.38μW are obtained respectively when the value of acceleration was 1 g, while for the latter, the maximum power is 9.13 μW at the acceleration of 5.0g with the optimized resistance of 15 kΩ.