A bird wing-inspired low-frequency double pendulum piezoelectric energy harvester with stoppers-assisted bending vibration

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Vibration-based piezoelectric energy harvesting technology, characterized by its straightforward structure, has potential applications in powering microelectronic devices. To address the demand for low-frequency energy harvesting performance, a double pendulum piezoelectric energy harvester with stoppers-assisted bending vibration was designed inspired by the bird wing. Its originality is to employ collision to improve the performance of the harvester. A dynamic equivalence-based piezoelectric cantilever beam model was developed to construct the electromechanical coupling dynamic equation for the proposed harvester. Road experimental results investigated the validity of the theoretical model, and the comparisons with existing literature also demonstrated the superiority of the proposed harvester in terms of power density. Then the variation of average power under different resistive loads was analyzed, and the improvement of the presence or absence of stoppers on energy harvesting capacity were discussed to highlight the advantages of collision-induced vibration. Subsequently, a parametric study of the design parameters revealed their impact on the output voltage of the proposed harvester, provided configuration suggestions for optimizing energy harvesting capacity, and explored the potential application scenarios. Furthermore, the current harvester generates an output power of 1.48 mW and a power density of 2.65 W/g/m2 at an acceleration level of 0.3 g. Due to its robust customization, the proposed harvester can achieve an output power of 4.18 mW and a power density of 7.47 W/g/m2 after optimization.