A piezoelectric buckling beam-type bistable energy harvester under rotational excitations

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel piezoelectric buckling beam-type bistable energy harvester (PBBEH), which aims to efficiently harvest energy from rotational motions. The designed PBBEH is most made up of a piezoelectric buckling beam and a rotational disk which is used to provide low-speed rotational motions. A lumped parameter model is used for numerical analysis and the energy harvesting features of the PBBEH are analyzed. More importantly, experiments indicate that the PBBEH has excellent energy harvesting performance in the frequency range of 1~9 Hz, and experimental results indicate that the presented PBBEH has the output power of 28 μW. Additionally, the PBBEH has obvious nonlinear, broadband dynamics characteristics. Both experimental and numerical results show that the output power curve has the tendency to increase and then decrease. Overall, in this paper, a good performance of this proposed harvester in ultra-low frequency rotational motions is found, and it provides a possible design for self-powered wireless sensors used for structural heath monitoring in the wind turbine, the automobile wheel and other rotational machines.

Enhancing Electrical Generation Efficiency through Parametrical Excitation and Slapping Force in Nonlinear Elastic Beams for Vibration Energy Harvesting

“…Then, they used MOMS to find linear approximations of the pre- and post-buckling states. Du et al [ 26 ] introduced a piezoelectric buckling-beam-type bistable energy harvester (PBBEH) for efficient energy extraction from rotational motions. The PBBEH integrates a piezoelectric buckling beam and a rotational disk to capture low-speed rotational movements.…”