Robust segment-type energy harvester and its application to a wireless sensor (original) (raw)
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In recent years, several researchers have been interested in harvesting electricity from low frequency vibration sources such as human movements utilising piezoelectric energy harvesters (PEH). Without the need for an external power source, the energy captured might possibly run portable electronic gadgets as well as certain medical equipment. The piezoelectric patch is often mechanically linked to a cantilever beam for this purpose, allowing the cantilever beam to dominate the resonance frequency. A multi-resonant PEH (MRPEH) is often used to improve the power produced by vibration sources with changing frequency. In this work, an effort is made to improve the performance of MRPEH by using a cantilever beam with two triangular branches that has been optimised in shape. The performance of the proposed MRPEH is further improved by tailoring the design to the frequency range of the intended vibration source. To get a better understanding of the influence of each design parameter on the power production at a low frequency vibration, a series of parametric studies were initially carried out using finite-element analysis. After that, selected outcomes were tested in the lab. Finally, an improved design was presented. The findings show that broadband energy harvesting is possible with the use of a correctly constructed MRPEH, and that the PEH system's efficiency may be greatly boosted.
A Self-Sufficient and Frequency Tunable Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvester
In this paper, a novel smart vibration energy harvester (VEH) is presented. The harvester automatically adjusts its natural frequency to stay in resonance with ambient vibration. The proposed harvester consists of two piezoelectric cantilever beams, a tiny piezomotor with a movable mass attached to one of the beams, a control unit, and electronics. Thanks to its self-locking feature, the piezomotor does not require energy to fix its movable part, resulting in an improvement in overall energy demand. The operation of the system is optimized in order to maximize the energy efficiency. At each predefined interval, the control unit wakes up, calculates the phase difference between two beams, and if necessary, actuates the piezomotor to move its mass in the appropriate direction. It is shown that the proposed tuning algorithm successfully increases the fractional bandwidth of the harvester from 4% to 10%. The system is able to deliver 83.4% of the total harvested power into usable electrical power, while the piezomotor uses only 2.4% of the harvested power. The presented efficient, autotunable, and self-sufficient harvester is built using off-the-shelf components and it can be easily modified for wide range of applications.
Optimization of Energy Harvesting concepts from vibration by piezoelectric actuator design
2016
The power supply is a major need in the sensor network deployment for structural monitoring applications in non-accessible structures and components. To develop smart structures within the Industry 4.0 and the smart anything everywhere concepts, autonomous integrated sensors are need. Under this premise, the present work presents several low cost energy harvesting solutions to support the design phase as a function of the surrounding available vibrations and the electronic components requirements. The simplest system to evaluate the potential design strategies is the evaluation of the piezoelectric sensor in a cantilever configuration that induces the mechanical stress in the piezoelectric layer to produce the voltage to be stored in the battery. The most efficient design is the bimorph concept, where two thin piezoelectric layers separated by a non-active intermediate layer are used. The flexibility, robustness and efficiency of homemade and commercial ly available bimorph PZT and ...
Piezoelectric Energy Harvester for IoT Sensor Devices
IJITEE (International Journal of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering)
Limited battery power is a major challenge for wireless sensor network (WSN) in internet of things (IoT) applications, especially in hard-to-reach places that require periodic battery replacement. The energy harvesting application is intended as an alternative to maintain network lifetime by utilizing environmental energy. The proposed method utilized piezoelectricity to convert vibration or pressure energy into electrical energy through a modular piezoelectric energy harvesting design used to supply energy to sensor nodes in WSN. The module design consisted of several piezoelectric elements, of which each had a different character in generating energy. A bridge diode was connected to each element to reduce the feedback effect of other elements when pressure was exerted. The energy produced by the piezoelectric is an impulse so that the capacitor was used to quickly store the energy. The proposed module produced 7.436 μJ for each step and 297.4 μJ of total energy with pressure of a ...
International Journal of Energy Research, 2020
Wireless sensor nodes (WSNs) and embedded microsystems have recently gained tremendous traction from researchers due to their vast sensing and monitoring applications in various fields including healthcare, academic, finance, environment, military, agriculture, retail, and consumer electronics. An essential requirement for the sustainable operation of WSN is the presence of an uninterrupted power supply; which is currently obtained from electrochemical batteries that suffer from limited life cycles and are associated with serious environmental hazards. An alternative to replacing batteries of WSNs; either the direct replacement or to facilitate battery regular recharging, is by looking into energy harvesting for its sustainable drive. Energy harvesting is a technique by which ambient energy can be converted into useful electricity, particularly for low-power WSNs and consumer electronics. In particular, vibration-based energy harvesting has been a key focus area, due to the abundant availability of vibration-based energy sources that can be easily harvested. In vibration-based energy harvesters (VEHs), different optimization techniques and design considerations are taken in order to broaden the operation frequency range through multi-resonant states, increase multi-degree-of-freedom, provide nonlinear characteristics, and implement the hybrid conversion. This comprehensive review summarizes recent developments in VEHs with a focus on piezoelectric, electromagnetic, and hybrid piezoelectric-electromagnetic energy harvesters. Various vibration and motion-induced energy harvesting prototypes have been reviewed and discussed in detail with respect to device architecture, conversion mechanism, performance parameters, and implementation. Overall sizes of most of the reported piezoelectric energy harvesters are in the millimeter to centimeter scales, with resonant frequencies in the range of 2-13 900 Hz. Maximum energy conversion for electromagnetic energy harvesters can potentially reach up to 778.01 μW/cm3. The power produced by the reported hybrid energy harvesters (HEHs) is in the range of 35.43-4900 μW. Due to the combined piezoelectric-electromagnetic energy conversion in HEHs, these systems are capable of producing the highest power densities.
Survey on Recent Development in Vibration Energy Harvesting using Piezoelectric Material
Due to the development of ultra-low power portable electronics and wireless sensors, the use of ambient energy, such as vibration energy for harvesting energy using piezoelectric materials has aroused great interests. A number of techniques have been proposed by the researchers for harvesting energy from the vibration source. Mostly, the techniques are classified as narrowband or broadband depending on the range of frequencies in which they produce maximum power. Substantial research has been done by the researchers in both these areas and countless techniques are proposed in order to harvest maximum power. A study is needed to compare these techniques to suggest a proper technique for a typical application. This paper presents a detailed categorization of the various piezoelectric energy harvesting techniques and also covering each of them with suitable examples. The pros and cons of each technique are also presented.
Sensors, 2021
The development of wearable devices and remote sensor networks progressively relies on their increased power autonomy, which can be further expanded by replacing conventional power sources, characterized by limited lifetimes, with energy harvesting systems. Due to its pervasiveness, kinetic energy is considered as one of the most promising energy forms, especially when combined with the simple and scalable piezoelectric approach. The integration of piezoelectric energy harvesters, generally in the form of bimorph cantilevers, with wearable and remote sensors, highlighted a drawback of such a configuration, i.e., their narrow operating bandwidth. In order to overcome this disadvantage while maximizing power outputs, optimized cantilever geometries, developed using the design of experiments approach, are analysed and combined in this work with frequency up-conversion excitation that allows converting random kinetic ambient motion into a periodical excitation of the harvester. The deve...
Power Processing Circuits for Piezoelectric Vibration-Based Energy Harvesters
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 2010
The behavior of a piezoelectric vibration-driven energy harvester with different power processing circuits is evaluated. Two load types are considered: a resistive load and an ac-dc rectifier load. An optimal resistive and optimal dc-voltage load for the harvester is analytically calculated. The difference between the optimal output power flow from the harvester to both load circuits depends on the coupling coefficient of the harvester. Two power processing circuits are designed and built, the first emulating a resistive input impedance and the second with a constant input voltage. It is shown that, in order to design an optimal harvesting system, the combination of both the ability of the circuit to harvest the optimal harvester power and the processing circuit efficiency needs to be considered and optimized. Simulations and experimental validation using a custom-made piezoelectric harvester show that the efficiency of the overall system is 64% with a buck converter as a power processing circuit, whereas an efficiency of only 40% is reached using a resistor-emulating approach.
Piezoelectric energy harvesting from machine vibrations for wireless sensor system
2015 12th International Conference on Electrical Engineering/Electronics, Computer, Telecommunications and Information Technology (ECTI-CON), 2015
In recent years, wireless sensor network is used in a variety of applications and highly required. These wireless sensor network is powered by the battery with limit energy. Therefore, the integration of energy harvester and wireless sensor network has received more attention because it can prolong the lifetime of battery in a sensor node. The focus of this paper is to design the energy harvesting device from machine vibrations for wireless sensor node, which the amplitude and frequency of vibration source were contributed on the design. The structure of energy harvesting devices is a resonant type piezoelectric energy harvester with a proof mass at the tip of the beam for tuning its resonant frequency. The proposed piezoelectric energy harvesters were then designed and analyzed by using Finite Element Method (FEM) to optimize the natural frequency of the harvester. Then, the prototype energy harvesters were made and mounted to a vibration source for experiments. The result reveals that the optimal piezoelectric energy harvester can generate the output power of 82.29 µW at the resonant frequency of 50 Hz.
Harvesting mechanical energy for ambient intelligent devices
Information Systems Frontiers, 2009
This paper deals with mechanical energy harvesters, power management and energy storage devices as important building blocks for wireless autonomous sensor networks. The basic task of the harvester is to convert vibrational into electrical energy. As these energy harvesting devices shrink in dimensions, while still providing sufficient energy, they will be key enablers for wireless autonomous sensor networks. For such a purpose, vibration harvesters are being investigated which feature a footprint of 1 cm 2 and an average power harvesting level of 100 μW. A detailed description of the design and fabrication for the piezoelectric, electrostatic and electromagnetic harvester is given. Furthermore, the interaction between a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester, the power converter and the energy storage system is investigated. A system level approach, including mechanical and electrical domains, is pursued for impedance matching between both domains in order to investigate the physical design aspects of the energy harvester on the electrical domain. Two matching methods, such as complex and real matching, are presented and compared to each other. Finally, several energy storage systems are briefly presented in order to store the irregular available scavenged energy and supply the functional circuitry in the system like sensor(s), signal processing and transceiver. In order to reduce power consumption, the transceiver operates in pulsed load condition which makes the energy storage system crucial.