Experimental investigation of fan-folded piezoelectric energy harvesters for powering pacemakers

This paper studies the fabrication and testing of a magnet free piezoelectric energy harvester (EH) for powering biomedical devices and sensors inside the body. The design for the EH is a fan-folded structure consisting of bimorph piezoelectric beams folding on top of each other. An actual size experimental prototype is fabricated to verify the developed analytical models. The model is verified by matching the analytical results of the tip acceleration frequency response functions (FRF) and voltage FRF with the experimental results. The generated electricity is measured when the EH is excited by the heartbeat. A closed loop shaker system is utilized to reproduce the heartbeat vibrations. Achieving low fundamental natural frequency is a key factor to generate sufficient energy for pacemakers using heartbeat vibrations. It is shown that the natural frequency of the small-scale device is less than 20 Hz due to its unique fan-folded design. The experimental results show that the small-scale EH generates sufficient power for state of the art pacemakers. The 1 cm³ EH with18.4 gr tip mass generates more than16 μW of power from a normal heartbeat waveform. The robustness of the device to the heart rate is also studied by measuring the relation between the power output and the heart rate.