Analysis of the failure position in the unimorph cantilever for energy harvesting

Abstract

Energy harvesting from the vibration through the piezoelectric effect has been studied for powering the wireless sensor node. As piezoelectric unimorph cantilever structure can transfer low vibration to large displacement, this structure was commonly deployed to harvest electric energy from vibrations. Piezoelectric unimorph structure was composed of small stiff piezoelectric ceramic on the large flexible substrate. As there is the large Young's modulus difference between the flexible substrate and stiff piezoelectric ceramic, flexible substrate could not homogeneously transfer the vibration to stiff piezoelectric ceramic. As a result, most piezoelectric ceramics had been broken at the certain point. We measured and analyzed the stress distribution on the piezoelectric ceramic on the cantilever.