Power MEMS

Cook-Chennault, K.A., Thambi, N., Sastry, A.M., 2008. Powering MEMS portable devices—a review of non-regenerative and regenerative power supply systems with special emphasis on piezoelectric energy harvesting systems. Smart Mater. Struct. 17, 043001. 

The deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) technique, first presented in the mid- to late 1990s, facilitated the fabrication of numerous innovative microsystems, especially power-MEMS systems. Since most MEMS devices involve some form of... 

Micro coolers Micro energy harvesting Micro energy scavenging Micro fuel cells Micro heat engines Micro power generation Microengines Micropropulsion Power MEMS... 

Novel microfabrication processes and materials to meet the needs of power MEMS, ranging from high-strength and high-temperature ceramics to stable hydrophUic/hydrophobic coatings... 

Development efforts to date have demonstrated most of the components required to create microturbine-based power MEMS. System-level studies have also been done to provide design guidelines for component development and to predict overall performance. This section describes the results achieved to date and the main conclusions that can be drawn from this work. 

Since microfabrication is one of the most limiting factors in the development of microturbines and power MEMS in general, further research in this area is required. Of most importance are ... 

Power MEMS [6] is the term used to describe miniaturized sources of electrical power. Batteries remain as the major source of portable electrical power, but MEMS-type turbines [6,154] and fuel cells are investigated as alternatives. The main limitations of batteries, for autonomous MEMS applications such as microrobots, are their low energy and power densities. Turbines and fuel cells have higher densities, but these systems are not yet available on the microscale. Fuel cells have, however, been miniaturized to some extent, with the size of a pack of cards already available commercially [154] for applications like powering cell phones. 

The deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) technique, first presented in the mid- to late 1990s, facilitated the fabrication of numerous innovative microsystems, especially power-MEMS systems. Since most MEMS devices involve some form of lithography-based microfabrication, the use of flat substrates is required. Often, these flat substrates involve the use of DRIE methods and result in structures characterized by extrusion of two-dimensional features into the third dimension as illustrated in Fig. 2. Therefore, microfluidic components are often limited in their geometrical appearance, which precludes full three-dimensional shapes commonly found in many large-scale fluidic devices such as pumps hydrofoils, turbine blades and vanes, mixers, etc. 

In the future the microfluidics community will need to seriously address cavitation in order to enable the practical realization of many high-velocity microscale fluid machines. While the last decade has witnessed significant advances in power-MEMS technology, one of the most deleterious phenomena effecting hydraulic system, cavita-... 

An alternate approach to traditional batteries consists of using MEMS (microelectromechanical systems), microfabrication, and nanotechnologies to implement a variety of energy conversion microsystems. These power MEMS could provide electrical power, propulsion, or cooling based on traditional operating principles or on novel prin-... 

Kiziriglou, M.E., Samson, D., Becker, T., Wright, S.W., Yeatman, E.M., 2011. Optimization of heat flow for phase change thermoelectric harvesters. In Power MEMS, Korea. 

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