abstract: the main aim of the vibration energy harvesters is to locally power autonomous devices such as wireless sensors. generally, power levels are low and the environmental benefit of the technology is to replace batteries rather than saving energy per se. piezoelectric vibrational energy harvesters are usually inertial mass based devices, where a cantilever beam with a piezoelectric outer ...

v-shaped and triangular cantilevers are widely employed in atomic force microscope (afm) imaging techniques due to their stability. for the design of vibration control systems of afm cantilevers which utilize patched piezo actuators, obtaining an accurate system model is indispensable prior to acquiring the information related to natural modes. a general differential quadrature element method (...

the most promising method for micro scale energy scavenging is via vibration energy harvesting which converts mechanical energy to electrical energy by the effect of coupling between electric fields and mechanical variables. using piezoelectric cantilevers is the most common method for vibration energy harvesting. changing the shape of the cantilevers can lead to changing the generated output v...

Power supply is a bottle-neck problem of wireless micro-sensors, especially where the replacement of batteries is impossible or inconvenient. Now piezoelectric material is being used to harvest vibration energy for self-powered sensors. However, the geometry of a piezoelectric cantilever beam will greatly affect its vibration energy harvesting ability. This paper deduces a remarkably precise an...

In this paper, the design of silicon based cantilevers for scanning probe microscopy has been described in detail. ANSYS software has been used as a tool to design and model the mechanical properties of the silicon based cantilevers. The incorporation of stress concentration regions (SCRs) with a thickness smaller than the cantilever thickness, to localize stresses, has been explored in detail ...

The concept of “energy harvesting” is to design smart systems to capture the ambient energy and to convert it to usable electrical power for supplying small electronics devices and sensors. The goal is to develop autonomous and self-powered devices that do not need any replacement of traditional electrochemical batteries. Now piezoelectric cantilever structures are being used to harvest vibrati...

Microcantilevers were first introduced as imaging probes in Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) due to their extremely high sensitivity in measuring surface forces. The versatility of these probes, however, allows the sensing and measurement of a host of mechanical properties of various materials. Sensor parameters such as resonance frequency, quality factor, amplitude of vibration and bending due to...

Surface stress measurements using atomic force microscopy ~AFM! require theoretical knowledge of the surface stress induced deformation of AFM cantilever plates. In a companion paper @J. E. Sader, J. Appl. Phys. 89, 2911 ~2001!#, a detailed theoretical study of the effects of homogeneous surface stress on rectangular AFM cantilever plates was presented. Since cantilevers of both rectangular and...

This paper uses finite element method to obtain the optimal performance of piezoresistive microcantilever sensor by optimizing the geometrical dimension of both cantilever and piezoresistor. A 250 μm x 100 μm x 1 μm SiO2 cantilever integrated with 0.2 μm thick Si piezoresistor was used in this study. The sensor performance was measured on the basis of displacement sensitivity and surface stress...