A review of power harvesting using piezoelectric materials (2003–2006)

Abstract

The field of power harvesting has experienced significant growth over the past few years due to the ever-increasing desire to produce portable and wireless electronics with extended lifespans. Current portable and wireless devices must be designed to include electrochemical batteries as the power source. The use of batteries can be troublesome due to their limited lifespan, thus necessitating their periodic replacement. In the case of wireless sensors that are to be placed in remote locations, the sensor must be easily accessible or of a disposable nature to allow the device to function over extended periods of time. Energy scavenging devices are designed to capture the ambient energy surrounding the electronics and convert it into usable electrical energy. The concept of power harvesting works towards developing self-powered devices that do not require replaceable power supplies. A number of sources of harvestable ambient energy exist, including waste heat, vibration, electromagnetic waves, wind, flowing water, and solar energy. While each of these sources of energy can be effectively used to power remote sensors, the structural and biological communities have placed an emphasis on scavenging vibrational energy with piezoelectric materials. This article will review recent literature in the field of power harvesting and present the current state of power harvesting in its drive to create completely self-powered devices.

The artificial neural network modelling of the piezoelectric actuator vibrations using laser displacement sensor

“…Piezoelectric actuators (PEAs) find a wide application in atomic force microscopes [2], accelerator based imaging systems [3], machine tools [4], computer components [5], industrial and medical robots [6] mainly due to their effective displacement capabilities. PEA's mechanical displacement characterization is a core issue in scientific and industrial research [7,8].…”

An Energy conversion model for cantilevered piezoelectric vibration energy harvesters using only measurable parameters

“…[1][2][3] Among various types of energy sources, mechanical vibration energy has received much attention due to its promising power density and ease of energy acquisition. [4][5][6][7] In this work, we are mainly concerned with piezoelectric energy harvesters (PEHs) because piezoelectricity is known to possess high energy conversion efficiency and ease of miniaturization. 7 Although many improved configurations for PEHs have been proposed to overcome the main issues of insufficient output power and narrow working frequency bandwidth, [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] cantilever-type PEHs with relatively low resonant frequencies have been more commonly employed so far either in unimorph or bimorph configurations.…”

Vibration energy harvesting using piezoelectric transducer and non-controlled rectifiers circuits

“…mobiles, portable electronics or wireless sensors networks (Sodano et al, 2004b;Pereyma, 2007;Anton and Sodano, 2007). These examples represent a huge potential for commercial applications in different areas as presented in recent market researches (IDTechEx, 2010).…”

“…The authors clarified through improved models with lumped and distributed parameters, besides presenting a good overview of the numerical and analytical modeling of electromechanical systems for power harvesting. The spotlight in this strand of papers about piezoelectric energy harvesting models, as for example Sodano et al (2004a), Liao and Sodano (2008), De Marqui Jr. et al (2009, is to study the maximum power that can be dissipated in a simple resistor or combination of linear electrical elements. The most part of these models focused on simplifying the energy harvesting circuit by a simple resistive load, but in the real-world applications, the energy harvesting circuit attached is more complex than a simple resistor.…”