Benefits and Limitations of using Several Piezoelectric Cantilever Elements for Harvesting Vibration Energy in Moving Freight Cars

Abstract

This paper investigates an energy harvester constituted by an array of N piezoelectric cantilever elements to raise the power harvested from the vibration energy in moving freight cars. Firstly, the parallel array is considered since it is able to increase the output current using the same bridge rectifier. Secondly, it demonstrates that connecting a number of N piezoelectric cantilever elements in the parallel configuration results in an upper bound to the harvested power, which the provided closed-form expressions predict. Lastly, it shows that numerical results obtained with closed-form expressions and simulations present a small discrepancy, confirming the precision of the deduced theoretical model.