Introduction to Piezoelectric MEMS Energy Harvesting

The book discusses a complete working model of a tapered cantilever piezoelectric (PZE) energy harvester (EH) which is used to build upon and discuss the uncertainty quantification strategies for variability-aware design of these devices. This chapter provides background information for the modeling work presented in the forthcoming chapters. The first part of the chapter introduces MEMS piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting and the physics involved, along with a survey of PZE devices. The second part of this chapter provides an introduction to uncertainty quantification and variability-aware design.