Low-frequency meandering piezoelectric vibration energy harvester

Abstract

The design, fabrication, and characterization of a novel low-frequency meandering piezoelectric vibration energy harvester is presented. The energy harvester is designed for sensor node applications where the node targets a width-to-length aspect ratio close to 1:1 while simultaneously achieving a low resonant frequency. The measured power output and normalized power density are 118 μW and 5.02 μW/mm(3)/g(2), respectively, when excited by an acceleration magnitude of 0.2 g at 49.7 Hz. The energy harvester consists of a laser-machined meandering PZT bimorph. Two methods, strain-matched electrode (SME) and strain-matched polarization (SMP), are utilized to mitigate the voltage cancellation caused by having both positive and negative strains in the piezoelectric layer during operation at the meander's first resonant frequency. We have performed finite element analysis and experimentally demonstrated a prototype harvester with a footprint of 27 x 23 mm and a height of 6.5 mm including the tip mass. The device achieves a low resonant frequency while maintaining a form factor suitable for sensor node applications. The meandering design enables energy harvesters to harvest energy from vibration sources with frequencies less than 100 Hz within a compact footprint.

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“…The performance of the proposed harvester is compared to the results of existing research studies which implement their harvesters in a cantilever system under a similar range of excitation frequency and acceleration. The existing research works [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42] produced a volume power density of (0.9 × 10 −2 -20 × 10 −2 ) µW/mm 3 under the excitation frequency of (1.4-100) Hz and the acceleration of (0.2-10) ms −2 . The current work produces a power density of 0.10 µW/mm −3 at a frequency and acceleration of 30 Hz and 0.4 ms −2 , respectively.…”

Study of vibration characteristics of railroad freight cars to determine technical design requirements to self-contained piezoelectric generators

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