MEMS Piezoelectric Energy Harvester Powered Wireless Sensor Module Driven by Noisy Base Excitation

Abstract

Despite recent advances in MEMS vibration energy harvesting and ultra-low power wireless sensors, designing a wireless sensor system entirely powered by a single MEMS device under noisy base excitation has remained a challenge. This paper presents a wireless sensor system co-integrated with a single MEMS piezoelectric vibration energy harvester chip excited by band-limited large amplitude noisy vibration characteristic of an automotive application. The use of soft stoppers in the MEMS package enables the harvesters to operate at an excitation level of 10 g(rms). A custom thick AlN (Aluminum Nitride) piezoelectric process is employed to fabricate the MEMS harvesters with a single MEMS chip generating 179 μW rectified power under these excitation conditions. A low-power wireless sensor module and a receiver module were also designed and demonstrated in this work. Experiments show that the wireless sensor module can be powered solely by the MEMS energy harvester commencing from the cold state. Successful wireless data transmission and receival of sensor data packets are recorded under representative conditions.

Experimental Characterization of Optimized Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters for Wearable Sensor Networks

“…The most common ambient energy sources are kinetic-converted via the piezoelectric effect or by using the electromagnetic or triboelectric principles, thermal (waste heat)collected by using thermoelectric (Seebeck effect) devices, solar or light energy-converted by using photovoltaics, as well as radio frequency (RF)-which can be harvested by using specialized antennas [5,6]. The resulting autonomous EH-powered wearable devices can include various sensors, e.g., heart rate, blood pressure, glucose level, temperature sensors or oximeters, as well as an energy storage element and data processing and communication components, making them suitable for creating autonomous sensor networks aimed at remote patient monitoring and telemedicine, professional athletics, work safety in high risk professions and various IoT or structural health monitoring (SHM) applications [3,4,7,8]. The concept of EH integration in autonomous sensor networks is outlined in Figure 1.…”

Optimisation and Management of Energy Generated by a Multifunctional MFC-Integrated Composite Chassis for Rail Vehicles

“…The current study focuses on these micro-scale powers harvested from the composite chassis of a rail vehicle under a low frequency operational vibration. Considering the power requirement of sensing and wireless sensor nodes for communication [24], the optimisation and energy management during harvesting process is numerically predicted for the real-world implementations of rail sectors based on our previous works presented in [25,26].…”

Kinetic Energy Harvesting for Wearable Medical Sensors

“…Energy harvesting is the process of collecting low-level ambient energy and converting it into electrical energy to be used as a power source for miniaturized autonomous devices. Examples of this can be seen in structural health monitoring, smart packaging solutions, communication systems, transportation, air and aerospace vehicles, structural biology, robotics, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices, sensor networks, wearable electronics, agriculture, forest fire detection, or various Internet of Things (IoT) components [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Examples of successfully demonstrated possible applications are tire pressure monitoring systems, resulting in autonomous devices powered by the motion of the vehicle [10], or the measurement of river pollution via autonomous sensor nodes powered by the river flow itself [11].…”