Energy Harvesting by Pyroelectric Effect Using PZT

Abstract

This paper considers energy harvesting using pyroelectric materials such as PZT-5A and thin-films. A simple model is used to predict the power generated based on the measured temperature of the material as a function of time. The measured and predicted results are presented and compared. In particular, the measured peak power density for a PZT-5A sample was 0.23 μWcm−2 for a maximum temperature rate of approximately 15 °Cs−1. The predicted peak power density under the same boundary conditions for thin-film lead scandium tantalate was over 125 μWcm−2. The power density is shown to be highly dependent upon the surface area and the pyroelectric coefficient, underlining the importance of maximizing these parameters.

Temperature measurements using a lithium niobate (LiNbO3) pyroelectric ceramic

“…Pyroelectric current can be used not only for temperature measurement sensors but also for waste energy harvesting. Any source of waste energy with temperature changes over time is suitable to produce pyroelectricity and can be harvested for many applications [12,[14][15][16][17]…”

Energy Harvesting Using PLZT and Lead-Free Ceramics and Their Piezoelectric Properties on the Nano-scale

“…The results showed that the harvested energy could be compatible with that used in autonomous sensors working in low-duty-cycle switched-supply mode [13][14][15][16][17]. Here, non-linear pyroelectric using the hysteresis dependence on temperature was investigated [13,14].…”

Pyroelectric Energy Conversion and Its Applications—Flexible Energy Harvesters and Sensors

“…As we have discussed in the previous section, although some of the lead-free materials have exhibited superior thermal energy harvesting performance to that of the lead-based pyroelectric materials, the lead-based materials show superior FoMs for applications such as infrared sensors, which make them an excellent choice for commercial sensor application. In the quest for excellent materials for PyEH application, a plethora of studies have been reported on PZT- and PMN-PT-based ceramics and their thin films [64,85,108,114,115,116,117,118,119,120,121]. The phase transformations of the ceramics play a huge role in the PyEH energy density and efficiency.…”