Abstract
Vibration energy harvesting is an emerging technology that enables electric power generation using piezoelectric devices. The prevailing approach for characterization of the energy-harvesting capacity in these devices is to consider a finite structure operating under forced vibration conditions. Here, we present an alternative framework whereby the intrinsic energy-harvesting characteristics are formally quantified independent of the forcing and the structure size. In doing so, we consider the notion of a piezoelectric material rather than a finite piezoelectric structure. As an example, we consider a suspended piezoelectric phononic crystal to which we apply Bloch’s theorem and formally quantify the energy-harvesting characteristics within the span of the unit cell’s Brillouin zone (BZ). In the absence of shunted piezoelectric circuits, the wavenumber-dependent dissipation of the phononic crystal is calculated and shown to increase, as expected, with the level of prescribed damping. With the inclusion of the piezoelectric elements, the wavenumber-dependent dissipation rises by an amount proportional to the energy available for harvest which upon integration over the BZ and summing over all branches yields a quantity representative of the net available energy for harvesting. We investigate both monoatomic and diatomic phononic crystals and piezoelectric elements with and without an inductor. The paper concludes with a parametric design study yielding optimal piezoelectric element properties in terms of the proposed intrinsic energy-harvesting availability measure.
Highlights
To provide a compact numerical quantification of the useful dissipation added to the phononic crystals (PnCs) due to the utilization of piezoelectric elements, i.e. the level of energy-harvesting availability, we introduce a wavenumber-dependent metric which we refer to as the energy harvest (EH) availability metric, given by: Z(κ)|∗ = ζ(κ)|∗ − ζ(κ)|PnC, (50)
We find that the cut-off value for the damping level is 2.63 for the piezo PnC without inductor and 0.98 for the piezo PnC with inductor, but it is again shown that higher dissipation is achieved by using a shunt circuit with an inductor at a relatively lower damping level damping level
Phononic crystals with piezoelectric patches are capable of harvesting energy from natural and artificial vibrations
Summary
In parallel to energy-harvesting research, the study of wave propagation in artificially structured materials has been an explosive area of research over the past three decades [25,26,27,28] In this domain, two key classes of engineered materials emerged, namely phononic crystals (PnCs) [29,30,31,32,33,34,35] and locally resonant acoustic/elastic metamaterials [36,37,38,39,40]. The theoretical and experimental studies of harnessing energy and generating power efficiently from artificial structures based on phononic crystals and acoustic/elastic metamaterials continue to receive significant attention and carry an immense amount of scope and future potential. Examples of piezoelectric phononic crystals modeled as materials with intrinsic properties
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