Improved Energy Harvesting from Wideband Vibrations by Nonlinear Piezoelectric Converters

By C. Trigona, S. Baglio, B. Andò, Marco Ferrari, Vittorio Ferrari, M. Guizzetti. 2009

591 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Vibration harvesters typically are linear mass-spring devices working at resonance. A different approach is here proposed based on nonlinear converters that exploit stochastic resonance with white-noise excitation. A piezoelectric beam converter is coupled to permanent magnets creating a bistable system bouncing between two stable states in response to random excitation. Under proper conditions, this significantly improves energy harvesting from wide-spectrum vibrations. A cantilever beam with added nonlinearity has been simulated by using a MATLAB® Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) Toolbox with a white-noise vibration. A nonlinear converter was then realized by screen printing low-curing-temperature lead zirconate titanate (PZT) films on steel cantilevers and excited with white-noise vibrations. Experimental results show that the performances of the converter in terms of output voltage at parity of mechanical excitation are markedly improved.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/21a3b07d79523ea65efdf4869002c95603098ba1

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In Biomedical Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Rotational energy harvesting using bi-stability and frequency up-conversion for low-power sensing applications: Theoretical modelling and experimental validation (2019, background): “Double potential wells are normally introduced in these devices using pre-loaded forces [24], magnetic levitation [25] or even residual stress generated by the fabrication process [26].”
Bistable vibration energy harvesters: A review (2013, background): “The harvester in Figure 5(b) was proposed in Ferrari et al. (2010b) and further developed in Ferrari et al. (2011).”
Review of magnetostrictive vibration energy harvesters (2017, background): “Due to the limited magnitude of magnetic force, the repelling permanent magnet configuration has only been applied to soft cantilever beams with natural frequencies of about 10Hz [58, 59].”
Experimental Duffing oscillator for broadband piezoelectric energy harvesting (2011, background): “In addition, a clear broadband power bandwidth is observed under a white noise excitation [17].”
Improving functionality of vibration energy harvesters using magnets (2012, background): “Ferrari et al. (2010), Lin and Alphenaar (2010), Andò et al. (2010), and Stanton et al. (2010) extended this idea to study the energy harvesting performance of bistable cantilevers with repulsive magnets under wide-spectrum vibrations.”
Toward Broadband Vibration-based Energy Harvesting (2010, methodology): “Ferrari et al. (2008) developed a multi-frequency piezoelectric converter, which has a similar schematic as Figure 31(a).”
A multiple-degree-of-freedom piezoelectric energy harvesting model (2012, background): “Cottone et al. (2009), Ferrari et al. (2010), and Andò et al. (2010) further studied the energy harvesting performance of bistable cantilevers with repulsive magnets under widespectrum vibrations.”
Non-linear piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting from a vertical cantilever beam with tip mass (2012, background): “The key aspect of the non-linear harvesters is the use of a double potential well function, so that the device will have two equilibrium positions (Cottone et al., 2009; Ferrari et al., 2010; Mann and Owens, 2010; Quinn et al., 2011; Ramlan et al., 2010).”