Experimental validation of energy harvesting performance for pressure-loaded piezoelectric circular diaphragms

Abstract

Energy harvesting is a research area that has seen greatly increased interest in recent years. Thispaper presents experimental efforts to validate analytically predicted energy generating performance of piezoelectric harvesters for use in a pressure-loaded system. The energy harvesters adopted in this article are simply supported, partially covered piezoelectric unimorph circular diaphragms designed to capture energy from fluctuating pressure and convert it into electrical energy. The design itself has been presented in earlier work; however there is a lack of experimentally validated models in the literature for these kinds of harvesters. This paper presents experimental results showing that when key factors such as the bonding layer in the composite harvesting structure are considered, the experimental results coincide with the analytical predictions. © 2010 IOP Publishing Ltd.