Project Information

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Project Reference: 145 
Title Piezoelectric Polymer Micro-Power Generator  
Project Status: available  
 
Proposer's Name: Dr. Jack Luo 
Company/University: U of B 
Phone: 01204903523 
Email: J.Luo@bolton.ac.uk 
Proposal Date: 23/01/2007 
Brief description
Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) are enabling technologies offering solutions for wide applications in the automotive, space exploration, biotechnology, remote sensing and healthcare. However their applications have been severely restricted by their power suppliers, particularly for remote sensing and monitoring for healthcare. Self-sustainable, small dimension micro-power generators with sizes of hundreds micrometer to millimetres are believed to be the solution for MEMS. Great efforts have been made to develop the relevant technologies. Piezoelectric power generator is one of the most popular micro-generators to harvest energy from mechanical vibration using piezoelectric ceramics such as PZT. However ceramics are brittle, and have a poor adhesion with metal electrodes. They suffer from poor reliability problems. Piezoelectric polymer such as poly(vinylidenefluoride) (PVDF) and its copolymer (PVDF-TrFE etc) have a high piezoelectric coefficient, and are flexible, and thus are suitable to fabricate micro power generators with high performance. The project is to analysis, design and model piezoelectric polymer based micro-power generator, and investigate the effect of composition of copolymer on the performance of the micro-power generators. Furthermore, conducting polymer will be considered to be the electrodes to minimize the poor adhesion and reliability problems.  
Project outcomes
ASIC to be fabricated No 
Hardware to be produced No  
Software to be produced Yes  
Requirements
Dedicated hardware that will be essential for the project. No hardware required 
Specialist software that will be essential for the project. To be decided 
Staff comments
 

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