Anand S
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India
Title: Vibration energy harvesting using pzt wafers
Biography
Biography: Anand S
Abstract
Piezo wafers are smart materials that exhibit electro-mechanical coupling. Piezo wafers when subjected to mechanical stress accumulate electric charge and conversely mechanical strain can be obtained by the application of electric field. Due to their intrinsic electro-mechanical coupling property, quick response time, and compactness, they are widely used in energy harvesting applications, structural health monitoring systems, Piezo Wafer Active Sensors (PWAS) and so on. In this current work, vibration energy harvesting using piezo wafer is carried out experimentally and the results are validated using a proposed numerical FE model in ABAQUS. The piezo wafer specimen (PSI-5H4E) used for the analysis has a coupling coefficient of k33 higher than k31, so for experiment, it is decided to operate in 33 coupling mode, in which the excited vibration force is applied on the poling direction of the piezo-wafer. In experiment, a uni-morph cantilever beam configuration (beam has only one piezoelectric layer attached to it) is employed, which is made to vibrate by using an exciter. In order to achieve maximum power efficiency, the cantilever beam is made to vibrate at the resonant natural frequency. The geometry of the cantilever beam plays an important role in optimizing the energy harvester’s efficiency and the power output. Hence, a study on the optimization of the cantilever beam dimension is also carried out using the FEA results obtained from ABAQUS.