Characterization and performance analysis of piezoelectric ZnO nanowire for low-frequency energy harvesting applications

Abstract

Due to optimistic advancements in energy harvesting, there has been a consequential increase in MEMS energy harvesting systems. The enormous availability of low-frequency vibrations in the environment motivates researchers to convert them to usable electrical energy with reasonable efficiencies by implementing effective transduction procedures like piezoelectric, piezoresistive, capacitive, magnetic and thermomagnetic means. To reinforce this development, different structures of energy harvesters were modeled and simulated for its performance characteristics. In this research article, a piezoelectric ZnO nanowire-based energy harvesting system is considered and its usefulness was analysed for different performance metrics. The analysis results have shown that the modeled energy harvester does not succumb to fracture at low-frequency vibrations. The proposed nanowire energy harvester produced a power density of 1.45 W/m 2 when subjected to low-frequency vibrations. Moreover, the maximum von-Mises stress observed was at 50 Hz which lies in the low-frequency vibration level thereby making a promising effect of scavenging maximum power.

Simulation, synthesis, and analysis of strontium-doped ZnO nanostructures for optoelectronics and energy-harvesting devices

“…Among these devices, piezoelectric nanogenerators use piezoelectric materials that are capable of converting mechanical energy (vibration and stress) into useful electrical energy. Some useful and commonly used piezoelectric materials include zinc oxide (ZnO), lead zirconate titanate, barium titanate, lead titanate, and lithium tantalite (Bestley Joe and Shaby, 2021;Iqbal et al, 2021;Poon et al, 2021;Tiwari et al, 2021;Debnath and Kumar, 2022). ZnO has been considered as the most suitable material piezoelectric energy harvester (Karumuthil et al, 2019;Rajeev et al, 2020).…”