Engineering Commons^™

Design, Fabrication And Characterization Of Zero Power Sensor/Harvester For Smart Grid Applications, Zeynel Guler

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

This study presents a flexible sensor/harvester device to be used in both electromagnetic sensing and energy harvesting applications for smart grids. When a current passes through a wire, the sensor detects the magnetic field created by that current. The sensor magnet interacts with the wire magnetic field resulting in a transfer of energy through the piezoelectric cantilever. Piezoelectric, conductive, magnetic, and magnetostrictive composite thin films were prepared to fabricate this device.

Initially, the magnet of the cantilever was optimized considering its shape, thickness, length, taper angle etc. via both simulations and experiments. Peak to peak voltage versus cantilever position graph …

Material Characterization And Comparison Of Sol-Gel Deposited And Rf Magnetron Deposited Lead Zirconate Titanate Thin Films, Katherine Lynne Miles

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) has been a material of interest for sensor, actuator, and transducer applications in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). This is due to their favorable piezoelectric, pyroelectric and ferroelectric properties. While various methods are available to deposit PZT thin films, radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering was selected to provide high quality PZT films with the added capability of batch processing. These sputter deposited PZT films were characterized to determine their internal film stress, Young’s modulus, composition, and structure. After characterization, the sputtered PZT samples were poled using corona poling and direct poling methods. As a means of comparison, commercially …