Bimorph vibration energy harvester with flexible 3D mesh structure

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a piezoelectric bimorph vibration energy harvester (VEH) with flexible 3D mesh elastic layer for the purpose of improving output power and lowering resonance frequency. Due to the high void ratio of the 3D mesh structure, it is possible to lower the bending stiffness of the cantilever. So, the deflection of the harvester and the strain in the piezoelectric layer increase. As a result of a vibration test, the resonance frequency is 26% lower and the output power is 1.5 times higher than the conventional solid flat plate VEH. Compared with the flat plate VEH, the proposed mesh VEH has 1.3 times larger tip deflection and the total output power is 20.4 μW that is possible to use as a power supply of low-power consumption sensor nodes for WSNs.