Energy Harvesting Strategy Using Piezoelectric Element Driven by Vibration Method

Abstract

This study demonstrates a method for harvesting the electrical power by the piezoelectric actuator from vibration energy. This paper presents the energy harvesting technique using the piezoelectric element of a bimorph type driven by a geared motor and a vibrator. The geared motor is a type of PWM controlled device that is a combination of an oval shape cam with five gears and a speed controller. When using the geared motor, the piezoelectric element is size of 36L×13W×0.6H. The output voltage characteristics of the piezoelectric element were investigated in terms of the displacement and vibration. When using the vibrator, the electric power harvesting is based on piezoelectric effect and piezoelectric vibrator consists of a magnetic type oscillator, a cantilever, a bimorph actuator and controllers. Low frequency operating technique using piezoelectric vibrator is very important because normal vibration sources in the environment such as building, human body, windmill and ship have low frequency characteristics. We can know from this study results that there are many energy sources such as vibration, wind power and wave power. Also, these can be used to the energy harvesting system using smart device like piezoelectric element.