Experimental and theoretical study of a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester under high temperature

Abstract

This paper focuses on studying the effect of increasing the ambient temperature up to 160 °C on the power harvested by an MEMS piezoelectric micro-cantilever manufactured using an aluminum nitride-on-silicon fabrication process. An experimental study shows that the peak output power decreases by 60% to 70% depending on the input acceleration. A theoretical study establishes the relationship of all important parameters with temperature and includes them into a temperature-dependent model. This model shows that around 50% of the power drop can be explained by a decreasing quality factor, and that thermal stresses account for around 30% of this decrease.