A Parametrically Broadband Nonlinear Energy Harvester

2016 ◽  
Vol 139 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanju Yildirim ◽  
Mergen H. Ghayesh ◽  
Thomas Searle ◽  
Weihua Li ◽  
Gursel Alici

In this work, for the first time, an energy harvester based on the nonlinear dynamical response of a parametrically excited cantilever beam in contact with mechanical stoppers has been fabricated and tested; a 145% increase in the bandwidth at which energy can be effectively harvested has been observed. Experimental and theoretical investigations have been performed in order to assess the increased operating bandwidth of the energy harvester fabricated; for the experimental investigations, an electrodynamic shaker connected to a shaking table has been used to parametrically stimulate the energy harvesting device. Results showed that the parametric energy harvester without stoppers displayed a weak softening-type nonlinear response; however, with the addition of mechanical stoppers the energy harvester displayed a strong hardening-type nonlinear response which is ideal for capturing kinetic energy over larger bandwidths. The addition of mechanical stoppers on a parametrically excited cantilever beam has significant qualitative and quantitative effects on the nonlinear parametric energy harvesting; the energy harvesting bandwidth was increased in the range of 35–145% by adjusting the stoppers.

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 357-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hao Wu ◽  
Lihua Tang ◽  
Yaowen Yang ◽  
Chee Kiong Soh

Energy harvesting from ambient vibrations using piezoelectric effect is a promising alternative solution for powering small electronics such as wireless sensors. A conventional piezoelectric energy harvester usually consists of a cantilevered beam with a proof mass at its free end. For such a device, the second resonance of the piezoelectric energy harvester is usually ignored because of its high frequency as well as low response level compared to the first resonance. Hence, only the first mode has been frequently exploited for energy harvesting in the reported literature. In this article, a novel compact piezoelectric energy harvester using two vibration modes has been developed. The harvester comprises one main cantilever beam and an inner secondary cantilever beam, each of which is bonded with piezoelectric transducers. By varying the proof masses, the first two resonant frequencies of the harvester can be tuned close enough to achieve useful wide bandwidth. Meanwhile, this compact design efficiently utilizes the cantilever beam by generating significant power output from both the main and secondary beams. An experiment and simulation were carried out to validate the design concept. The results show that the proposed novel piezoelectric energy harvester is more adaptive and functional in practical vibrational circumstances.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 6332-6337

This paper reviews the piezoelectric energy harvesting from mechanical vibration. The recent development in the microelectronic devices and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) requires continuous power source for better performance. Many researchers have been done to develop a permanent portable power source for microelectronic devices. Micro energy harvesting (MEH) consists of two basic elements; freely available energy and transducer. Energy is everywhere around us in different forms. The energy conversion ability of piezoelectric energy harvester is high among different MEH techniques. A cantilever type piezoelectric energy harvester under different shapes is mostly studied in the last few years. The output of piezoelectric harvester depends upon the deflection produced, more deflection led to more electrical output. The deflection in cantilever beam under different shapes is different. This review paper presents a comparison of different piezoelectric cantilever beam shapes and output generated analyzed in the last decade.


2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Yin Chen ◽  
Dejan Vasic ◽  
Yuan-Ping Liu ◽  
François Costa

In this article, a piezoelectric energy harvesting device comprises a bistable vibrating cantilever beam and a switching-type interface circuit (synchronized switching harvesting on an inductor) is proposed, and the resulting performance is compared to the traditional linear technique. It was known that the synchronized switching techniques increase efficiently the output power of the piezoelectric energy harvester for low-coupled structures. However, the traditional piezoelectric energy harvester based on a cantilever beam is only efficient at resonance. To broaden the available bandwidth, a bistable nonlinear technique was proposed. In this article, the bistable technique and synchronized switching harvesting on an inductor interface are combined together to accomplish a more efficient broadband piezoelectric energy harvester. The power flow and work cycles are adopted to simplify the analysis of the switching techniques and then summarize the increasing performance of the nonlinear piezoelectric harvester. Finally, simulation results and experimental validations show that the proposed integrated device owns larger bandwidth and collects more harvested energy.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Jianjun Liu ◽  
Xianghua Chen ◽  
Yujie Chen ◽  
Hong Zuo ◽  
Qun Li

Piezoelectric cantilever beams, which have simple structures and excellent mechanical/electrical coupling characteristics, are widely applied in energy harvesting. When the piezoelectric cantilever beam is in a wind field, we should consider not only the influence of the wind field on piezoelectric beam but also the electromechanical coupling effect on it. In this paper, we design and test a wind-induced flag-swing piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH). The piezoelectric cantilever beam may vibrate in the wind field by affixing a flexible ribbon to the free end as the windward structure. To fulfill the goal of producing electricity, the flexible ribbon can swing the piezoelectric cantilever in a wind-induced unstable condition. The experimental findings demonstrate that the flag-swing PEH performs well in energy harvesting when the wind field is excited. When the wind speed is 15 m/s, the peak-to-peak output AC voltage may reach 13.88 V. In addition, the voltage at both ends of the closed-loop circuit’s external resistance is examined. The maximum electric power of the PEH may reach 43.4 μW with an external resistance of 650 kΩ. After passing through the AC-DC conversion circuit, the flag-swing PEH has a steady DC voltage output of 1.67 V. The proposed energy harvester transforms wind energy from a wind farm into electrical energy for supply to low-power electronic devices, allowing for the creation and use of green energy to efficiently address the issue of inadequate energy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max-Uwe Noll ◽  
Lukas Lentz ◽  
Utz Von Wagner

A typical setup for energy harvesting is that of a cantilever beam with piezoceramics excited by ambient base vibrations. In order to get higher energy output for a wide range of excitation frequencies, often a nonlinearity is introduced by intention in that way, that two magnets are fixed close to the free tip of the beam. Depending on strength and position of the magnets, this can either result in a mono-, bi- or tristable system. In our study, we focus on a bistable system. Such systems have been investigated thoroughly in literature while in almost all cases the beam has been discretized by a single shape function, in general the first eigenshape of the linear beam with undeflected stable equilibrium position.There can be some doubts about the suitability of a discretization by a single shape function mainly due to two reasons. First: In case of stochastic broadband excitations a discretization, taking into consideration just the first vibration shape seems not to be reasonable. Second: as the undeflected position of the considered system is unstable and the system significantly nonlinear, the question arises, if using just one eigenshape of the linear beam is a suitable approximation of the operation shapes during excited oscillations even in the case of harmonic excitation. Are there other, e.g. amplitude dependent, possibilities and/or should multiple ansatz functions be considered instead?In this paper, we focus mainly on the second point. Therefore, a bistable cantilever beam with harmonic base excitation is considered and experimental investigations of operation shapes are performed using a high-speed camera. The observed operation shapes are expanded in a similar way as it is done in a theoretical analysis by a corresponding mixed Ritz ansatz. The results show the existence of distinct superharmonics (as one can expect for a nonlinear system) but additionally the necessity to use more than one shape function in the discretization, covering also the amplitude dependence of the observed operation shapes.


2022 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 605-619
Author(s):  
Khairul Azman Ahmad ◽  
Noramalina Abdullah ◽  
Mohamad Faizal Abd Rahman ◽  
Muhammad Khusairi Osman ◽  
Rozan Boudville

Piezoelectric energy harvesting is the process of extracting electrical energy using energy harvester devices. Any stress in the piezoelectric material will generate induced voltage. Previous energy harvester device with stiff cantilever beam was generated low harvested energy. A flexural piezoelectric energy harvester is proposed to improve the generated harvesting energy. Polyvinylidene difluoride is a polymer piezoelectric material attached to a flexible circuit made of polyimide. Four interdigitated electrode circuits were designed and outsourced for fabrication. The polyvinylidene difluoride was then attached to the interdigitated electrode circuit, and a single clear adhesive tape was used to bind them. Four piezoelectric energy harvesters and ultrasonic ceramic generators were experimentally tested using a sieve shaker. The sieve shaker contains a two-speed oscillator, with M1=0.025 m/s and M2=0.05 m/s. It was used to oscillate the energy harvester devices. The resulting induced voltages were then measured. Design 4, with the widest width of electrode fingers and the widest gap between electrode fingers, had the highest power generated at an output load of 0.745 µW with the M2 oscillation speed. The oscillation speed of the sieve shaker impacted the energy harvester devices as a higher oscillation speed gave higher generated power.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (20) ◽  
pp. 3136-3145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhengqiu Xie ◽  
Shengxi Zhou ◽  
Jitao Xiong ◽  
Wenbin Huang

Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting is a promising technique to power wireless sensor networks. This article originally presents a magnetically coupled asymmetric monostable dual-cantilever piezoelectric energy harvester consisting of a generating piezoelectric cantilever beam and an auxiliary cantilever beam. Theoretical and experimental results both verify that the asymmetric harvester has the superior performance compared with the conventional magnetically coupled symmetric bistable dual-cantilever piezoelectric energy harvester, yielding higher voltage output under different magnetic coupling intensities and different power densities of the band-limited Gaussian white noise random excitation. More importantly, the mechanical strain of the asymmetric harvester is much smaller than that of the symmetric harvester, being lower than half of the latter one under strong magnetic coupling. Therefore, due to its higher energy conversion efficiency and better durability, the proposed asymmetric harvester is beneficial for practical environment vibration energy harvesting.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 201-210
Author(s):  
Yoshikazu Tanaka ◽  
Satoru Odake ◽  
Jun Miyake ◽  
Hidemi Mutsuda ◽  
Atanas A. Popov ◽  
...  

Energy harvesting methods that use functional materials have attracted interest because they can take advantage of an abundant but underutilized energy source. Most vibration energy harvester designs operate most effectively around their resonant frequency. However, in practice, the frequency band for ambient vibrational energy is typically broad. The development of technologies for broadband energy harvesting is therefore desirable. The authors previously proposed an energy harvester, called a flexible piezoelectric device (FPED), that consists of a piezoelectric film (polyvinylidene difluoride) and a soft material, such as silicon rubber or polyethylene terephthalate. The authors also proposed a system based on FPEDs for broadband energy harvesting. The system consisted of cantilevered FPEDs, with each FPED connected via a spring. Simply supported FPEDs also have potential for broadband energy harvesting, and here, a theoretical evaluation method is proposed for such a system. Experiments are conducted to validate the derived model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 142-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Y. Abdollahzadeh Jamalabadi ◽  
Moon K. Kwak

This study presents the analytical solution and experimental investigation of the galloping energy harvesting from oscillating elastic cantilever beam with a rigid mass. A piezoelectric wafer was attached to galloping cantilever beam to harvest vibrational energy in electric charge form. Based on Euler-Bernoulli beam assumption and piezoelectric constitutive equation, kinetic energy and potential energy of system were obtained for the proposed structure. Virtual work by generated charge and galloping force applied onto the rigid mass was obtained based on Kirchhoff's law and quasistatic assumption. Nonlinear governing electro-mechanical equations were then obtained using Hamilton's principle. As the system vibrates by self-exciting force, the fundamental mode is the only one excited by galloping. Hence, multi-degreeof-freedom equation of motion is simplified to one-degree-of-freedom model. In this study, closed-form solutions for electro-mechanical equations were obtained by using multi-scale method. Using these solutions, we can predict galloping amplitude, voltage amplitude and harvested power level. Numerical and experimental results are presented and discrepancies between experimental and numerical results are fully discussed.


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