A dual resonant structure for vibration energy harvesting using triboelectric materials

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) requires many sensors that are usually powered by electrochemical batteries. The problem of using batteries includes expensive periodic replacement and disposal work that causes environmental pollution. To overcome such issues, energy harvesting technology has emerged as a good solution to scavenge vibration and wind energy from the ambient environment. Structures vibrate due to base excitations when it is subjected to wind flows. The energy of such structural vibration can be converted into electricity using energy transducers, such as electromagnetic, piezoelectric, and triboelectric transducers. The triboelectric energy transducer is of low cost with high power density. This project aims at harvesting ambient vibration and wind energy using triboelectric materials. The triboelectric energy harvester (TEH) will be designed, and a prototype of the harvester will be manufactured. The harvester will be based on a 2 degree of freedom set-up consisting of 2 beams. With the set-up made of fiber epoxy for the plate and aluminium for the beams, with the aim of obtaining power output from the cantilever beams doing contact-separation process which will be explained further later. Experiments will be carried out to test the harvester under vibration in the lab. In this paper, experiments are conducted to find out the most efficient model of TEH there is in terms of power output and resonance frequency using our facilities. The experiment consists of utilizing gap distance between the two cantilever beams, finding the most optimal frequency for the most ideal power output as well as utilizing tip masses to find out if it enables the harvester to be more intensive. More extensive studies can be done to determine the ideal TEH to be made for power output generation.