A rail-borne piezoelectric transducer for energy harvesting of railway vibration

Abstract

This paper investigates design, modelling, and test issues related to piezoelectric energy transducer. The model analyzes a rail-borne "seismic" energy harvester that is designed to generate electrical energy from local variations in rail acceleration. The energy harvester analyzed in this model consists of a piezoelectric PZT film clamped at one end to the rail with a tip mass mounted on its other end. It includes two sub-models in this paper: a vehicle-track interaction model considering vehicle travelling load; and a cantilevered piezoelectric beam model for the visualization of voltage and power profile and frequency response. Four rail irregularities (American 6th grade track spectrum, Chinese track spectrum, German high and low-disturbance track spectrum) are compared and implemented into the calculation script. The calculated results indicate a rail displacement of 0.2 mm to 0.8 mm. Vibration tests of the proposed rail-borne device are conducted; a hydraulic driven system with excitation force up to 140 kN is exploited to generate the realistic wheel-rail interaction force. The proposed rail-borne energy harvester is capable of energy harvesting at low-frequency (5 Hz to 7 Hz) and small railway vibration (0.2 mm to 0.4 mm rail displacement). The output power of 4.9 mW with a load impedance of 100 kOhm is achieved. The open circuit peak-peak voltage reaches 24.4 V at 0.2 mm/7 Hz/5 g wheel-rail excitation. A DC-DC buck converter is designed, which works at the resonance frequency of 23 Hz/5 g on a lab vibration rig, providing a 3.3 VDC output.

Energy Harvesting Research: The Road from Single Source to Multisource

“…Harvesting vibrational energy dissipated from these structures could solve these issues. To date, many energy harvesting powered structural monitoring systems have been reported, including those for asphalt pavement, oil pump, vehicle suspension, bridge, vehicle tire, railway and train, and aircraft and spacecraft . There are also plenty of comprehensive reviews discussing the topic of vibrational energy harvesting …”

Comparison of the curve negotiation properties of two different articulated monorail vehicles

“…Junfeng mentions that the monorail simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental data when the America sixth spectrum [21][22][23] is used in the study. 24 So the irregularities of the track can be scaled by the irregularities of the America sixth spectrum.…”

Condition monitoring of urban rail transit by local energy harvesting

“…Intelligent railway track with renewable energy technology has thus been a research hotspot in recent years. [2][3][4][5] Review of the state of the art…”

“…The electromagnetic coupling equation 3and (4) represents the method of calculating the induced voltage and the magnetic flux density, and equations (5) and (7) describe the relationship between the damping force and the electromagnetic energy parameter. Equation (8) is the final representative equation of the theory, and the energy produced by the vibration transducer is equal to the work done by the damping force.…”