MEMS Based Broadband Piezoelectric Ultrasonic Energy Harvester (PUEH) for Enabling Self-Powered Implantable Biomedical Devices

Acoustic energy transfer is a promising energy harvesting technology candidate for implantable biomedical devices. However, it does not show competitive strength for enabling self-powered implantable biomedical devices due to two issues – large size of bulk piezoelectric ultrasound transducers and output power fluctuation with transferred distance due to standing wave. Here we report a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) based broadband piezoelectric ultrasonic energy harvester (PUEH) to enable self-powered implantable biomedical devices. The PUEH is a microfabricated lead zirconate titanate (PZT) diaphragm array and has wide operation bandwidth. By adjusting frequency of the input ultrasound wave within the operation bandwidth, standing wave effect can be minimized for any given distances. For example, at 1 cm distance, power density can be increased from 0.59 μW/cm(2) to 3.75 μW/cm(2) at input ultrasound intensity of 1 mW/cm(2) when frequency changes from 250 to 240 kHz. Due to the difference of human body and manual surgical process, distance fluctuation for implantable biomedical devices is unavoidable and it strongly affects the coupling efficiency. This issue can be overcome by performing frequency adjustment of the PUEH. The proposed PUEH shows great potential to be integrated on an implanted biomedical device chip as power source for various applications.