Piezoelectric-Driven Charging Supercapacitors For Bio-Medical Sensor Applications

Piezoelectric materials can be fabricated as a generator to transform mechanical energy in ambient vibration into electrical energy, which can be stored and used to power some ultra- low power devices such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. Since most of the ultra-low power devices are wireless, it becomes essential to have their own independent power supplies. In tradition, the power supplies come from bulky lead acid and lithium batteries, which have environment unfriendly chemical ingredients. Most importantly, the lead acid and lithium batteries have limited life of 500-1000 cycles compared to millions or more for most commercially available carbon based Supercapacitor. With the introduction of many portable electronic device and health monitor device using Piezo based energy harvesting has become one of the fascinating subjects of interest to provide portable electrical power.