FIGURES OF MERITS OF PIEZOELECTRIC MATERIALS IN ENERGY

HARVESTERS

R. Xu1*, S.G. Kim1

1
Mechanical Engineering Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA,
USA

Abstract: Piezoelectric material selection is crucial in the design of piezoelectric micro energy harvesters.
Different figures of merit (FOMs) have been sought to compare and to form a preference of piezoelectric
materials depending on the applications. FOMs may include the operational bandwidth and the cost in addition to
the energy conversion efficiency at MEMS-scale. This paper reviews only FOMs that are related to energy
conversion efficiency. The FOMs for MEMS harvesters should be much different from the FOMs for bulk
piezoelectric material harvesters. After analyzing composite beam based MEMS energy harvesters, accurate
evaluation on the holistic efficiency is obtained. Also a new FOM is proposed to represent the energy conversion
capacity of the piezoelectric materials, which existing FOMs do not take into account.

Keywords: piezoelectric, energy harvesting, figure of merit (FOM)

INTRODUCTION the thin film piezoelectric materials [3,4].

A variety of performance metrics have been used to
compare piezoelectric materials on diverse
applications. For actuating and sensing, the
piezoelectric strain constant and piezoelectric voltage
constant are appropriate criterion while the output
voltage, power density, cost and operational
bandwidth are for energy harvesting. Among them,
energy conversion efficiency is the most important
one when designing piezoelectric MEMS energy
harvesters for real applications.
Various FOMs have been generated for evaluating
the energy conversion efficiency of piezoelectric
materials: the widely used coupling factor, which is
the ratio of stored electrical energy to input
mechanical energy (we will name it as FOM1 in this
paper) [1], the product of two piezoelectric constants,
d and g, which leaves out the input and measures the
stored electrical energy when the piezoelectric
materials are at the same stress (FOM2 in this paper)
[2], and the maximum power condition when the
piezoelectric layer is much thinner than the elastic
beam layer of a linear cantilever structure (FOM3 in
this paper) [3,4], a FOM (FOM4) based on on-
resonance and off-resonance [5].
MEMS scale energy harvesters typically have a
composite beam structure, which consists of a thin
film piezoelectric layer, an elastic substrate and other
layers of different functions. The evaluation of thin
film piezoelectric element’s performance from the
composite beam can be an issue, since the elastic
layer dominates the energy distribution in the beam.
Coupling factor cannot be applied directly, and some
have proposed a new FOM (FOM3) to characterize
To characterize the thin film of piezoelectric
material in a composite beam, it is necessary to study
the distribution of elastic energy in each layer of the
composite beam. This paper provides an accurate
measure of the devices’ performance (FOM5) in this
way. The output power of an energy harvester not
only depends on the efficiency of energy transduction
but the energy capacity of the piezoelectric material.
Therefore, a new FOM (FOM6), which combines the
transduction efficiency and the energy conversion
capacity, is proposed for comparing piezoelectric
materials for energy harvesting application in a more
comprehensive way.
FOMS OF PIEZOELECTRIC MATERIALS
FOM1: Energy Transduction Rates
Electromechanical coupling factor is usually
adopted to assess piezoelectric materials’ transduction
efficiency. The coupling factor is defined as:
2 d 2 Ey e2
FOM1 = k = = (1)
εe ε e Ey
k2 = stored electrical energy / input mechanical
energy (2)
where d and e are the piezoelectric coefficients, Ey is
Young’s modulus, and εe is the dielectric permittivity.
The physical meaning of the coupling factor is
illustrated graphically in Fig. 1 [1]. When a
compressive stress T is applied to a short-circuited
piezoelectric element, the induced strain increases
E
along the slope s33 . Then remove the stress and keep
the element open-circuited, the strain decreases along
D
s33 . Here, s33 is the elastic compliance for stress in

978-0-9743611-9-2/PMEMS2012/$20©2012TRF 464 PowerMEMS 2012, Atlanta, GA, USA, December 2-5, 2012
direction 3 and accompanying strain in direction 3. 2

( d i g ) i  
1 F
The superscript E and D denote under constant ue = (9)
2 A
electric field (short circuit) and under constant electric
displacement (open circuit) respectively. If connecting where F is the force, A is the area and ue is the area of
an electric load, the induced electrical energy will do W1 in Fig.1:
work to the load and the cycle completes. From the 1
energy point of view, W1 + W2 is the total input 2
( )
ue = s E − s D i T 2 (10)
mechanical energy density, W1 is the work done on From Eq. 9 and Eq.10, it is obvious that the
the electrical load. Coupling factor is the ratio of the electrical energy density in the piezoelectric materials
effective stored electrical energy W1 to the total input is proportional to FOM2. FOM2 is a straightforward
mechanical energy W1 + W2. measure to compare the electric energy generated by
various piezoelectric materials at the same mechanical
stress applied. It should be noted that when the same
amount of mechanical energy is injected instead of the
same stress, even if the FOM2 of a material is higher,
the generated electrical energy might be smaller if the
transduction rate of the material is low.

FOM3: Piezoelectric Thin Film Based Beam

Some have argued that the FOM1 described above
works well when the passive elastic layer can be
Fig1. Graphical illustration of coupling factor [1]. neglected, and if the piezoelectric layer is thin
The coupling factor FOM can be derived by compared with the passive elastic layer, FOM1 is not
evaluating Eq. 2. When a mechanical stress is applied accurate. Therefore, another FOM has been used to
to a piezoelectric element, the energy density of the measure the efficiency of piezoelectric element in an
input mechanical strain energy is, energy harvester when the passive elastic layer is
1 much thicker than piezoelectric layer [3,4]:
Êm = ε 2 E y (3)
2 e2
FOM 3 = (11)
The energy density of the stored electrical energy is, εe
1
Eˆ e = ε e E 2 (4) The origin of this FOM comes from Roundy’s
2 formula for maximum power that can be extracted
Therefore, the coupling factor can be obtained by from the piezoelectric vibrational harvester [6],
using its definition:
1  e2   1− ν   m  2 2
ε E2 Pmax =  31T   Qtot a0 (12)
4  ε 0ε 33   E y   ω 0 
E
k 2 = e = e2 (5)
Em ε E y
In [3,4], it is claimed that for thin film
Substituting E = gσ and σ = ε E y into Eq. 5, the
piezoelectrics, Young’s modulus and Poisson s ratio
coupling factor becomes, of the substrate material are to be considered instead
k 2 = ε e Ey g 2 (6) of those of the piezoelectric film itself, the term
2 T
Since g = d / ε e , Eq. 6 can be rewritten as e31 / ε 0ε 33 therefore can be used as a FOM.
d 2 Ey
k2 = (7) FOM4: On-Resonance and Off-Resonance
εe Oliver et al. [5] have proposed a dimensionless
FOM for piezoelectric material in energy harvesting
FOM2: Piezoelectric Coefficients Product devices as,
Priya et al. proposed a FOM by eliminating the  k2 i Q   d31 i g31 
input mechanical energy in coupling factor [2]: FOM 4 =  31 E m    (13)
 s11  tan δ  off −resonance
on−resonance
d2 e2
FOM 2 = = 2 (8) where k31 is the transversal electromechanical
εe Ey εe coupling factor, Qm is the mechanical quality factor,
FOM2 is the product d ⋅ g in the electrical energy s11E is the elastic compliance at the constant electric
density formula [2]: field, d31 is the transversal piezoelectric strain constant,
g31 is the transversal piezoelectric voltage constant,
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and tanδ is the loss factor. The FOM is a product of U strain = ∑ ui (20)
two FOM’s representing off-resonance and on- i
resonance conditions and is dimensionless. The FOM5 is,
k 2 i u piezo
FOM5: Piezoelectric Materials in Composite FOM 5 = (21)
Beams ∑u i

To characterize thin piezoelectric element based
energy harvesting device, we have considered the
strain energy distribution in the composite beam, and
generated a new FOM:
FOM5 =total stored electrical energy / total input
mechanical energy
=total stored electrical energy / (mechanical
energy input to elastic layer + mechanical energy
input to piezoelectric layer) (14)
To see how the elastic layer changes FOM5, we
may still use the double layer cantilever beam with
varying the elastic layer. Fig. 3 illustrates the variance
of FOM5 with increasing thickness of elastic layer for
six commonly used piezoelectric materials. The
material properties used for simulation are listed in
Table 1.

To calculate FOM5, we need to know the strain

energy in the whole beam and that in the piezoelectric
layer. The strain energy density in i-th layer of a
general multi-layer cantilever beam is,
1σ2
ûi = (15)
2 Ei
where σ is the stress and Ei is the Young’s modulus of Fig2. Comparison of FOM5 with increasing thickness
i-th layer. The strain energy in i-th layer can be then of elastic layer for six different piezoelectric
obtained, materials.
L h+ ∑ hi 1 σ
2
Table 1. Piezoelectric material properties [7 – 11].
ui = ∫ ∫ Wdydx (16)
0 h+ ∑ hi−1 2 E d33 (m/V) E (Pa) εr εy
i

where W is the width of the beam. The stress is PVDF -3.30e-11 2.00e+09 12 3.00%
linearly distributed with respect to neutral axis: AlN 3.40e-12 4.20e+11 10.4 0.15%
yE BaTiO3 1.49e-10 6.70e+10 1700
σ= i (17) /
ρ PZT 3.60e-10 6.30e+10 1700 0.20%
where y is the vertical coordinate with respect to PZN-PT 2.00e-09 9.26e+09 5200 1%
neutral axis, ρ is the radius of curvature of the beam.
PMN-PT 2.82e-09 8.36e+09 8200 0.12%
The moment generated by the force at the tip and the
radius of curvature has the relationship,
EI FOM6: Incorporating Energy Capacity
M= = Fx (18) Besides transduction rate, energy capacity of
ρ piezoelectric materials can significantly determine the
where EI is the product of effective Young’s modulus performance of the piezoelectric energy harvesters.
and moment of inertia of the beam, x is the Since the maximum stored electrical energy of a
longitudinal location along the beam, and F is the piezoelectric element not only depends on the
concentrated force at the free end of the cantilever conversion efficiency but also the maximum amount
beam. Substituting Eq.17 and Eq.18 to Eq.16, and of mechanical energy the element can absorb, more
perform the integration, the strain energy in the i-th specifically, it is the product of the maximum input
layer can then be evaluated as, mechanical energy and the energy conversion rate.
h+ ∑ hi When an external energy source input energy to a
WL3 Ei F 2  y 3 
ui = (19) piezoelectric element, if assuming the element goes
6 ( EI )  3  h+∑ hi−1
2
through the ideal cycle, the input energy will be
The total strain energy in the beam is the sum of the transferred into the strain energy of the piezoelectric
strain energy in all layers: element. The maximum strain energy that a
piezoelectric element can capture is limited by its

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maximum strain and Young’s modulus. The yield FOM5. FOM3 involves simpler computation, which
strain should be the upper limit of the deformation to makes it a convenient measure of composite beam
keep the element from significant fatigue and based energy harvesters. However, if a more accurate
degradation. Assuming any strain level can be reached evaluation is needed, FOM5 should be considered.
in the piezoelectric element, and then the maximum FOM6 provides a new perspective to designers. Not
mechanical energy in a piezoelectric element is, only the energy conversion rate, but also the energy
εy εy 1 conversion capacity is revealed by this new FOM.
u y = ∫ σ ( ε ) d ε = ∫ E yε d ε = E yε y2 (22) Besides, the simplicity of calculation is preserved,
0 0 2
where uy is the maximum strain energy density, σ is which makes FOM6 a desirable tool for future
material comparison.
the stress, ε y is the yield strain, Ey is the Young’s
This paper reviewed several FOMs for MEMS
modulus. With the maximum strain energy density, energy harvesters that are related to energy conversion
we can define a new FOM – the maximum stored efficiency. Characterization of piezoelectric thin film
electrical energy density of the piezoelectric material based energy harvesters can be successful by selecting
after transduction, which is the product of maximum proper FOM during the design stage and choosing the
strain energy and the conversion rate: right active material.
d 2 E y2ε y2 e2ε y2
FOM 6 = k 2 i u y = = (23) Acknowledgement Authors are grateful to MIT-
2ε e 2ε e
INL (International Iberian Nanotechnology
where d and e are the piezoelectric coefficients, and εe
Laboratory) Program for the support of this study.
is the dielectric permittivity.
Table 2. Summary of five main FOMs discussed in
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