Butterfly micro bilayer thermal energy harvester geometry with improved performances

Abstract

This paper reports the recent progress of a new technology to scavenge thermal energy, implying a double-step transduction through thermal buckling of a bilayer aluminum nitride / aluminum bridge and piezoelectric transduction. A completely new scavenger design is presented, improving greatly its final performance. The butterfly shape reduces the overall device mechanical rigidity, which leads to a decrease of buckling temperatures compared to previously studied rectangular plates. In a first time we compared performances of rectangular and butterfly plates with an equal thickness of Al and AlN. In a second time, with a thicker Al layer than AlN layer, we will study only butterfly structure in terms of output power and buckling temperatures, and compare it to the previous stack.