Vibration energy harvesting using piezoelectric materials

Abstract

Vibration energy harvesting has rapidly advanced through the years, creating greater possibility of continuous and self-power supply using in wireless sensors and portable electronic devices. Because of the unique electro-mechanical coupling effect, piezoelectric materials have established their useful applications in harvesting of vibration energy in form of energy harvester.

As the source of vibration in real application usually involve randomly orientation, the piezoelectric energy harvester should be designed that able to harvest the vibration energy from different direction.

A frame-type piezoelectric energy harvester has been designed and tested in this study. The relevant tests have been conducted to highlight the detail performance of the harvester and the impact of the different orientation, which including different load mass, series and parallel connection and individual MFC test.

In summary, this study shown that the proposed frame-type energy harvester is able to perform at every orientation in plane with a specified frequency.