Preliminary results on shape optimization of ambient-based piezoelectric energy harvester

Vibration energy harvesting holds an encouraging future for powering low power consumption electronic devices. This paper presents a simulation result of cantilever based MEMS piezoelectric harvester that can harvest the vibration energy from the ambient surroundings at lower frequency. Zinc Oxide (ZnO) was selected as the piezoelectric material. The simulation was conducted using IntelliSense's CAE tool to obtain the resonant frequency, electrical potential and the length dimension for each prototype. The simulation results show that the trapezoidal shape give excellent performance compared to other standard transducer shapes, achieving around of 0.91V electrical potential at a low frequency of 79.92Hz.