Micro Electro Mechanical System (MEMS) energy harvester's research interests have been increasing rapidly, indicating that the topic has given significant contributions to the sustainable development of energy alternatives. Although many research activities have been conducted and reported since several years ago, only limited efforts have been made to analyze the research's impact in this area. In this paper, we report a bibliometric analysis on the research progress in MEMS for energy harvester. VOSviewer software is used to support the analyst that includes the distributions of the publication journals, authors, affiliations and the highly cited papers reporting the progress as well as the frequency of keywords and their relationships found in the search engine. The analysis is mainly aimed to identify the research map based on publication reports. 1772 papers were initially identified and summarized based on the analysis on three focused mainstream research topics in MEMS for alternative energy, such as MEMS energy harvester, power harvesting and energy scavenging, other term analogies to MEMS such as micromachines and microsystem were included in the analysis parameter. As a result, it is found that the study on the MEMS energy harvester is mostly categorized in the engineering field, while China has been conducting the most projects. The Journal MEMS and Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering have been the most journals publishing reports on MEMS energy harvester's research progress. Based on these analyses, some potential issues in future MEMS energy harvester research have been identified, including the contributions of new materials, the MEMS new structure's involvement, and the optimization of the vibration concepts and principles of MEMS energy harvester. These analyses would give an overview on the progress of the development and improvement in MEMS energy harvester and give a proper guideline for future MEMS research in the energy field.
In this study, we present a comprehensive review of polymer-based microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) electromagnetic (EM) actuators and their implementation in the biomedical engineering field. The purpose of this review is to provide a comprehensive summary on the latest development of electromagnetically driven microactuators for biomedical application that is focused on the movable structure development made of polymers. The discussion does not only focus on the polymeric material part itself, but also covers the basic mechanism of the mechanical actuation, the state of the art of the membrane development and its application. In this review, a clear description about the scheme used to drive the micro-actuators, the concept of mechanical deformation of the movable magnetic membrane and its interaction with actuator system are described in detail. Some comparisons are made to scrutinize the advantages and disadvantages of electromagnetic MEMS actuator performance. The previous studies and explanations on the technology used to fabricate the polymer-based membrane component of the electromagnetically driven microactuators system are presented. The study on the materials and the synthesis method implemented during the fabrication process for the development of the actuators are also briefly described in this review. Furthermore, potential applications of polymer-based MEMS EM actuators in the biomedical field are also described. It is concluded that much progress has been made in the material development of the actuator. The technology trend has moved from the use of bulk magnetic material to using magnetic polymer composites. The future benefits of these compact flexible material employments will offer a wide range of potential implementation of polymer composites in wearable and portable biomedical device applications.