An Investigation into Width Reduction Effect on the Output of Piezoelectric Cantilever Energy Harvester Using FEM

Piezoelectric materials can be used as mechanisms to transfer mechanical energy, usually ambient vibration, into electrical energy that can be stored and used to power other devices. Recently, increased interest in wearable computer concepts and remote electrical devices has provided motivation for more extensive study of piezoelectric energy harvesting. A typical piezoelectric energy harvester is a unimorph rectangular cantilever located on a vibrating host structure, to generate electrical energy from base excitations. In this paper existing mathematical modeling and finite element approaches using elementary single-degree-of-freedom models are used to investigate the effects of width reduction on the output of unimorph piezoelectric cantilever energy harvester and achieving more power density. It can be seen that by division of a single-piece energy harvester into an array of equal cantilevers and connecting them in parallel, the efficiency of conversion system increases. This research raises a new perspective that, an array of cantilever piezoelectric energy harvesters with a certain total width, can lead to more harvesting energy than a single-piece harvester of similar width

Keywords:

Vibration Energy harvester , Piezoelectric , Wideband operation , Resonant frequency , Finite element simulation