In this study, a PID controller was designed for the active vibration suppression of a smart beam equipped with PZT (Lead-Zirconate-Titanate) patches. The smart beam is a cantilever aluminium beam having eight symmetrically located surface-bonded piezoelectric patches. In this particular application, a group of PZT patches closed to the root of the beam was used as actuators and from the remain...

In this article, we discuss an uncooled infrared IR detector based on an “arch-type” design realized with advanced microelectromechanical systems technology. Bimaterial microcantilevers undergo bending as their temperature changes due to the absorption of infrared photons. The bending is proportional to dissimilar thermal expansion of the two different materials composing the cantilever. We sel...

A metamodel-based approach is developed to optimize the force and displacement performance of a piezoceramic bimorph actuator. A segmented design with a variable piezoceramic layer thickness is proposed, where the thicknesses of discrete piezoceramic segments are used as the design variables. Design of experiments and metamodeling techniques are employed to construct computationally inexpensive...

Flow Energy Harvesters (FEHs), equipped with piezoelectric active layers, are designed to extract energy from non-pulsating flows. FEHs featuring cantilevers tip-mounted Vibration Inducers (VIs) develop a galloping motion. In this paper, we present the modelling of recently introduced VI shape, semitubular-shaped winglets, which do not produce wake interacting cantilever. Such peculiarity allow...

Smart actuators have many potential applications in various areas, so the development of novel actuation materials, with facile fabricating methods and excellent performances, are still urgent needs. In this work, a novel electromechanical bimorph actuator constituted by a graphene layer and a PVDF layer, is fabricated through a simple yet versatile solution approach. The bimorph actuator can d...

The rapid expansion in the spectrum of two-dimensional (2D) materials has driven the efforts of research on the fabrication of 2D composites and heterostructures. Highly ordered structure of 2D materials provides an excellent platform for controlling the ultimate structure and properties of the composite material with precision. However, limited control over the structure of the adherent materi...

This paper reports the extended design and simulation of a screen printed piezoelectric energy harvester. The proposed design was based on a previous credit card sized smart tag sensor node, and packages the power conditioning circuit in the free space above the tungsten proof mass layer. This approach enables electronic components to be mounted onto the cantilever beam. These are used to provi...

We report on a new wafer transfer technique that can remove and transfer surface-micromachined layers to application-specific substrates. This process, however, is not limited to only MEMS devices and can be applicable to other semiconductor devices. Successful transfer of a 1 cm x 1 cm MEMS chip with electrostatically actuated curled cantilever switches to a transparent quartz substrate has be...

In many applications of vibratory energy harvesting, the external disturbance is most appropriately modeled as a broadband stochastic process. Optimization of the average power generated from such disturbances is a feedback control problem, and solvable via LQG (linear–quadratic–Gaussian) control theory. Implementing the optimal feedback controller requires a power electronic drive capable of t...