Investigation of folded spring structures for vibration-based piezoelectric energy harvesting

This paper presents a fixed-fixed folded spring as an alternative elastic element for beam-based piezoelectric energy harvesting. In order to harvest energy from low frequency vibration in an optimal manner, the natural/operational frequencies of harvesters must be reduced to match low frequency input vibrations. Therefore, natural frequency reduction of vibration-based energy harvesters is critical to maximize output power at low operational frequency. The mechanical optimization of cantilever-based piezoelectric energy harvesters is limited by residual stress-based beam curling that produced through microfabrication adding additional mechanical stiffness to the system. The fixed-fixed folded spring structure presented in this paper allows for increased effective beam length and residual stress relaxation, without out of plane beam curling to further reducing the natural frequency. Multiple designs of folded spring energy harvesters are presented to demonstrate the effect of important design parameters. It is shown that the folded spring harvesters were capable of harvesting electricity at low natural frequencies, ranging from 45 Hz to 3667 Hz. Additionally, the harvesters were shown to be insensitive to microfabrication-based residual stress beam curling. The maximum power output achieved by the folded spring harvesters was 690.5 nW at 226.3 Hz for a single harvesting element of an array, with a PZT layer thickness of 0.24 μm. The work presented in this paper demonstrates that the fixed-fixed folded spring can be used as a viable structural element for low frequency piezoelectric energy harvesting to take advantage of ambient vibrations found in low frequency applications.