An Efficient Piezoelectric Windmill Topology for Energy Harvesting from Low Speed Air Flows

Abstract

This paper presents a topology for micro-power piezoelectric wind energy harvesting useful for developing selfpowered wireless sensor nodes. The features of the proposed topology compared with the existing piezoelectric/electromagnetic topologies are: (i) delivering power at high-voltage levels particularly at low-speed air-flows; (ii) starting operation at low cut-in speeds (about 1 m/s); and (iii) robust structure for operating at high-speed wind flows practically tested up to 20 m/s. The proposed topology consists of a small fan with embedded permanent magnets (PMs) and a piezoelectric beam with a PM proof mass which interacts with the PMs in the fan to harvest wind power. The paper also presents an analytical model and a design procedure to determine the number of PMs in the fan and their arrangements to maximize the captured power and minimize the cut-in speed. Using a prototype of the proposed topology, it is shown that the device starts capturing wind power at the wind speeds above 0.9 m/s. It is also shown that the suggested topology is at least 10% more efficient than the existing topologies in using piezoelectric materials and its total volume power density is higher than the other topologies.

RETRACTED: Design of a piezoelectric energy conversion based wind generator

“…18 Nasrin et al developed a micro-power piezoelectric wind EH that had a power density of 2 mW/cm 3 . 19 Kurt et al developed a piezoelectric wind EH that produced a power of 0.2 mW at a wind speed of 1.75 m/s. 20 Orego et al described an experimental study of wind energy harvesting by self-sustained oscillations.…”

Energy Harvesting using Piezoelectric Transducers: A Review

“…Ozdemir developed a piezoelectric based energy harvesting system which generates average o/p power of 519 microwatt for a wind speed range of 4.5 -5 metre/second (Fig. 6) (Sirohi and Mahadik, 2011 (Sirohi and Mahadik, 2011) Recently, several highly efficient self-excited windmill or wind generator has been fabricated and tested using PZT (Lead Zirconate Titanate) material (Oy and Ozdemir, 2018;Zhou et al, 2019;Wanga et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2016;Laumanna et al, 2017;Hosseinabadi et al, 2013;Hosseinabadi et al, 2016;Zhou et al, 2016).…”

“…Ocean wave is a great source of renewable energy. A piezo-electric coupled buoy energy harvester was developed by (Hosseinabadi et al, 2013), which generates the usable electric energy from the ocean wave. It was reported, an electrical power of 24 watt was generated using that particular system with piezoelectric cantilever of length 1 meter and the buoy length of 20 meter.…”

Design, Analysis, and Evaluation of a Compact Electromagnetic Energy Harvester from Water Flow for Remote Sensors

“…In addition, 3D printing technology was also employed to fabricate miniature wind turbines for energy harvesting as presented in [26]. Aiming at low-speed air flow, an energy harvesting topology consisting of a small fan with embedded permanent magnets and a piezoelectric beam was proposed to achieve higher efficiency and power density in [27]. However, the relatively high viscous drag on the blades at low Reynolds numbers may deteriorate the performance of the miniature blade turbines [9].…”