Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting device based on water sloshing-inspired extensions

Abstract

Inspired by shallow-water sloshing in a moving tank, a novel type of vibration-based piezoelectric energy harvesting device composed of a piezoelectric bimorph beam and an extension tank is proposed in this paper. The structure and working principle of the proposed device are provided. Then, the effects of different heights of water filling in the tank on the performances of the harvester are studied and analyzed. Experiments are set up to investigate the actual device performance by changing the base excitation frequency and load resistance for different water heights. The results show that by modulating the water height, the resonant frequency and bandwidth can be adjusted, which can enhance the energy harvesting performance of the device at different ambient vibration frequencies. This study provides some clues to improve the performance of the vibration-based energy harvesting devices.

Frequency Band Broadening and Charge Density Enhancement of a Vibrational Triboelectric Nanogenerator with Two Stoppers

“…Vibration energy is the most widely distributed in the environment and can be found in mechanical equipment, building structures, water waves, breeze blowing, and our daily activities [7,8]. Three conventional transduction mechanisms including electrostatic [9,10], electromagnetic [11], and piezoelectric [12] can convert ambient vibrational energy into useful electric power. Here, an urgent challenge in vibrational energy harvesting is to enhance the performance under a wide working bandwidth.…”