Experimental Investigation for Enhancing the Output Power of a Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

Abstract

This paper investigates an experimental approach for enhancing the output power of a piezoelectric energy harvester. The proposed method adopts inductance to reduce the effect of the piezoelectric harvester’s impedance, and boost the output power. Four electrical circuits for a piezoelectric beam harvester are investigated experimentally; Simple Resistive Load (SRL), Inductive Load (IL), Standard AC-DC, and Inductive AC-DC circuits. The results show that the adaptation of inductor in the IL and Inductive AC-DC improves the output power compared to the SRL and Standard AC-DC respectively. The Inductive AC-DC circuit is shown to increase the output power by 6.7% in comparison to the existing standard AC-DC circuits.

Circuit Optimization for Enhancing the Output Power of a Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

“…This value is used throughout this study for the internal capacitance. (Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2017) The graphs in Figures 17-20 show the comparison of the experimental results with the numerical results for the SRL and the IL circuits. These graphs are based on the load resistance connected to the oscilloscope.…”

“…The numerical results and the experimental results are found to be in good compatibility based on the inductor values utilized in the experiments. (Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2017) To show the effect of the inductance in circuits more clearly, the result of an experiment on only the SRL circuit and the IL circuit with 10 mH inductor over a smaller range of resistance is shown in Figure 21. This plot includes only the load resistances that have higher output power in comparison to other load resistances in order to show the difference between output powers of the SRL and IL circuits more clearly.…”

“…Using inductance to improve the energy harvesting circuit has been preliminarily investigated in both theory and experiment (Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2016;Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2017). This paper builds upon the preliminary results of (Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2016;Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2017) and completes the theory and experimentation. The inductance is utilized to produce a positive reactance to reduce this negative reactance, and therefore increases the output power of the piezoelectric energy harvester.…”

“…Figure 14. Experimental setup for the piezoelectric harvester attached on the cantilever beam (Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2017) The first experiment utilized the SRL circuit in order to experimentally find the value of the optimal load resistance. The internal capacitance of the piezoelectric is then calculated based on equation (4).…”

“…The standard AC-DC circuit is shown in Figure 3, and the Inductive AC-DC circuit is shown in (Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2016) Figure 4. Inductive AC-DC circuit schematic (Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2016;Zargarani & Mahmoodi, 2017) The voltage drop across a diode, , is assumed to be zero, as diodes are considered to be ideal. Therefore, the optimal output power is:…”