Scale laws for enhanced power for MEMS based heat energy harvesting

Abstract

An innovation approach to thermal energy harvesting is presented. It consists of a two step conversion of heat into electricity. The new technique can be used for powering ultra-low power electronics and autonomous systems. One of the keys to improve the generated power density is downscaling of individual devices. Laws modeling downscaling have been established in this paper and show that the miniaturization of the devices by a factor k increases the generated power density by the same factor, due to the increased speed of heat transfer. The scaling laws predict increasing power gain when miniaturizing the devices with use of e.g. VLSI technologies. This can help in providing a strong alternative to Seebeck devices.