Application of low temperature co-fire ceramics on in-plane micro-generator

This study presents a new method of fabrication of in-plane rotary electromagnetic micro-generator. Low temperature co-fired ceramics (LTCC) technology is applied to fabricate micro-coil for the micro-generator. The process of the LTCC micro-coil provides more cost-effective and timesaving approaches than other process such as Lithographie Galvanoformung Abformung (LIGA), LIGA-like and filament-winding methods. This micro-generator consists of multilayer planar LTCC silver (Ag) micro-coil and multipolar hard magnets of Nd/Fe/B (neodymium, iron, and boron). This study focuses on the fabrication and test of the in-plane micro-generator to obtain a high power output. There are three different configurations of planar LTCC Ag micro-coils investigated in this study, which are sector-shaped, circle-shaped, and square-shaped micro-coils. Both the printing linewidth and spacing of these micro-coils are 100 mu m. The multipolar hard magnet Nd/Fe/B with outer diameter of 9 turn and thickness of 700 mu m is molded and sintered. The self-designed measurement facility of the power output is established, which consists of a drive mechanism and data acquisition units. A prototype of the micro-generator is as small as 9 mm x 9 mm x 1 mm in volume size. The experimental results show that the micro-generator with sector-shaped micro-coil has the highest power output of 1.89 mW, and the effective value of the induced voltage of 205.7 mV at 888.3 Hz (about 13,325 rpm) is achieved. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.