Increasing the Power Output from Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvesters
Contact: Alex Schlichting - ads264@cornell.edu
Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvesting:
<span style="color: #222222">The goal of energy harvesting systems is varied, but they all have the potential for making significant impacts in today's energy/resource-conscious society: structural health monitoring for bridges, ships, airplanes, and even wind turbine blades; wildlife tracking tags; wireless sensor nodes for collecting environmental data.</span>
<span style="color: #222222">Piezoelectric energy harvesting systems are being developed by many researchers to capture ambient vibration energy. Every system typically consists of three different sections: the piezoelectric energy harvesting device (Figure 1), the power conditioning electronics, and the electronic system load (typically a microcontroller).</span>
<span style="color: #222222"><strong>Figure 1:</strong> A cantilevered bimorph piezoelectric vibration energy harvester.</span>
<span style="color: #222222"><strong>Specific Project Description:</strong></span>
The Laboratory for Intelligent Machine Systems has developed a piezoelectric power conditioning scheme, synchronized switching and discharging to a storage capacitor through an inductor (SSDCI), which experimentally increased the power output from a piezoelectric harvester by 200% [1] (Figure 2). <span style="color: #222222">This project will involve an interdisciplinary team of M.Eng. students from the ECE and MAE departments to explore, implement, and compare passive, mechanical, and microcontroller-based methods for conditioning the power from a cantilevered bimorph piezoelectric beam.</span> <span style="color: #222222">They will be compared based on overall efficiency and the robustness of the design to variations in the vibration energy source.</span>
- (b)
Figure 2: (a) SSDCI circuit schematic and (b) its voltage waveforms
[1] Wu, W.J., et al., "Modeling and experimental verification of synchronized discharging techniques for boosting power harvesting from piezoelectric transducers," Smart Mater. Struct. Vol 18, No 5.055012, Pg. 1-14, 2009.