Piezoelectric Cantilever Prototype for Energy Harvesting in Computing Applications

This paper presents a piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) to convert vibrations to electrical power. A unimorph cantilever beam is used to generate voltage on piezoelectric material bonded close to the anchor of the cantilever beam. A 4.85 x 1 x 0.04 cm structural layer with piezoelectric material yields peak-to-peak voltage of 64 V at the resonance frequency of the structure. The empirically confirmed maximum power output is close to 0.5 mW. The results from validation data on the observed structure has been correlated to the simulations in finite element method (FEM) program using piezoelectric analysis tools.