Design and Studies on a Low-Frequency Truss-Based Compressive-Mode Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

Zhongjie Li, Zhengbao Yang, Hani Naguib, Jean Zu

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

31 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a truss-based compressive-mode piezoelectric energy harvester to harness energy from low frequency vibrations with a wide bandwidth and a high-power output. The design is an integration of mainly three modules: separated excitation mechanism from transduction mechanism for low resonant frequency, truss mechanism for magnification of the applied force onto the piezoelectric element, and amplitude limit mechanism to induce impact forces. We then formulate the harvester as a two-degrees-of-freedom system featured by superposition of harmonic and impact-induced nonlinear responses. Based on our structure design, we fabricate a prototype to conduct experimental studies. The experimental results show that the harvester is capable of harnessing energy efficiently from vibrations at the resonant frequencies of 3.3 and 6.09 Hz. The total bandwidth is expanded to 4.2 Hz owing to the structure nonlinearity and bifurcation. The open circuit voltage reaches 83.3 V and maximum power gets up to 38.2 mW with the matching impedance. Also, the harvester exhibits excellent charging performance in terms of saturated voltage and charging time.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8470973
Pages (from-to)2849-2858
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
Volume23
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2018

Keywords

  • Bifurcation
  • energy conversion
  • frequency conversion
  • nonlinear system
  • piezoelectricity

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