Energy harvesting with piezoelectric drum transducer

Abstract

Piezoelectric materials can convert ambient vibrations into electrical energy. In this letter, the capability of harvesting the electrical energy from mechanical vibrations in a dynamic environment through a piezoelectric drum transducer has been investigated. Under a prestress of 0.15 N and a cyclic stress of 0.7 N, a power of 11 mW was generated at the resonance frequency of the transducer ͑590 Hz͒ across an 18 k⍀ resistor. It is found that the energy from the transducer increases while the resonance frequency of the transducer decreases when the prestress increases. The results demonstrate the potential of the drum transducer in energy harvesting. © 2007 American Institute of Physics. ͓DOI: 10.1063/1.2713357͔With the recent advances in wireless and microelectromechanical systems technology, the demand for portable electronics and wireless sensors is growing rapidly. Since these devices are portable, it becomes necessary to carry their own power supply. Piezoelectric materials are ideal sources of such energy because they can convert mechanical strain energy into electrical energy or vice versa. Energy can be reclaimed and stored for later use to recharge a battery or power a device through a process called energy harvesting. Many researchers have studied the concept of utilizing piezoelectric material for energy generation over the past few decades. 1-5 In one prototype of power harvesting system, a polyvinylidene fluoride film was used and implemented in vivo on a mongrel dog. The feasibility of extracting energy from the expansion and contraction of the rib cage during breathing was explored in 1984. 6 The power harvesting system produces a peak voltage of 18 V, which corresponded to a power of about 17 W. Another investigation for power harvesting from ambulation to provide supplemental power to operate artificial organs by using lead zirconate titanate ͑PZT͒-based piezoelectric stacks during walking or jogging was performed by Antaki et al. in 1995. 7 An average power of 250-700 mW was extracted from walking, and over 2 W was obtained from jogging. The recent progress in power harvesting from mechanical vibration to power generation was performed at Pennsylvania State University. [8][9][10] These studies were made on a cymbal transducer having a ceramic dise with a diameter of 29 mm and 1 mm thickness. A power of 39 mW can be transferred across the low impedance load under a dynamic force of 7.8 N at 100 Hz. The effective piezoelectric field constant of the material is a crucial parameter for selecting an element of the piezoelectric energy harvesting device, which is proportional to the harvested power. In this letter, a drum transducer was studied as the energy harvesting device because it was reported previously that the drum transducer has good electrical and mechanical performance. 11 It is expected that the energy harvesting performance of the drum transducer can be better than that of the cymbal transducer. The electrical power generation from a single drum transducer element under a cyclic force ...

An experimental study on self-powered vibration control and monitoring system using electromagnetic TMD and wireless sensors

“…According to the widely accepted impedance-matching principle [9,14,30], the external resistance R load was tuned to be equal to the internal resistance, namely, 34 Ω. This case is designed to assess the potential energy harvesting capability by the EMTMD system under impedance-matching condition.…”

“…In particular, vibration-based energy harvesting techniques were developed based on various different transduction mechanisms, e.g. electromagnetic induction [4][5][6], piezoelectricity [7][8][9][10], electrostatic generation [11] dielectric elastomers [12] and so on. Many vibration-based energy harvesting devices are essentially micro or small resonant structures (e.g.…”

Enhancement of power output by a new stress-applied mode on circular piezoelectric energy harvester

“…Sheng Wang reported a piezoelectric drum transducer, under a pre-stress of 0.15 N and a cyclic stress of 0.7 N, a power of 11 mW was generated at the resonance frequency of the transducer (590 Hz) across an 18 kΩ resistor. 21 Recent progress was performed by Chen and Yang. They manufactured a piezoelectric diaphragm with a dimension of Φ25 mm.…”

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

“…(7), the following relation was employed: 22,24,29 (8) In Eq. (7), the values of the equivalent mass (M eq ) and the correction factor (M r ) can be calculated as: 20,30 (9) (10) where M b is the mass of a cantilevered PEH and M t denotes the magnitude of a tip mass. The detailed procedure to derive Eq.…”

“…[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. It is noted that cantilever-type PEHs still play a role as a reference when the performance of a newly developed PEH are to be compared.…”