Flexible Electret Energy Harvester with Copper Mesh Electrodes

Abstract

Flexible energy harvesters are desired in biomedical applications since human motion is often complicated and aperiodic. However, most demonstrated flexible energy harvesters employ piezoelectric materials which are not biocompatible. Therefore we propose a PDMS-based flexible energy harvester with Parylene-C electret suitable for biomedical applications. To address the reliability issues of sputtered metal electrodes, we use copper mesh electrodes to improve the reliability. The proposed flexible harvester was fabricated and characterized. The measured power of the proposed harvester was 3.33 mu W in the compression tests at 20 Hz and 8.5 nW in the finger bending tests at 2 Hz.