Investigation on various beam geometries for piezoelectric energy harvester with two serially mounted piezoelectric materials

Abstract

This paper presents the performance (frequency response, open-circuit voltage, optimum load, voltage and power under optimum load) of various designs of cantilever-based piezoelectric energy harvester with multiple piezoelectric materials, which is excited at the fixed end using the source of mechanical vibration and to compare the performance with single piezoelectric-mounted energy harvester. The performance of the energy harvester was determined using experimental and numerical methods. COMSOL Multiphysics 5.3a was used to obtain the numerical results of energy harvester. The results show that inverted taper in thick and width, inverted taper in thick and inverted taper in width piezoelectric energy harvesters produce 46.15%, 13.13% and 37.70% more power than the conventional rectangular piezoelectric energy harvester. The resonant frequency of inverted taper in thick and width, inverted taper in thick and inverted taper in width energy harvesters is 52.05%, 45.5% and 11.08% lower than the conventional rectangular energy harvester. It is observed that the different beam geometries with two piezoelectric material produce more power than the beams with single piezoelectric material.