Electrical performances of pyroelectric bimetallic strip heat engines describing a Stirling cycle

International audienceThis paper deals with the analytical modeling of pyroelectric bimetallic strip heat engines. Thesedevices are designed to exploit the snap-through of a thermo-mechanically bistable membrane to transforma part of the heat flowing through the membrane into mechanical energy and to convert it into electricenergy by means of a piezoelectric layer deposited on the surface of the bistable membrane. In this paper,we describe the properties of these heat engines in the case when they complete a Stirling cycle, and weevaluate the performances (available energy, Carnot efficiency…) of these harvesters at the macro- andmicro-scale