Broadband vibration energy harvesting from a non-deterministic system: Performance of different piezoelectric patch shapes

Abstract

Harvesting energy from ambient structural vibration using piezoelectric materials gained massive interest in the past decade. Piezoelectric harvesters can be incorporated in many applications; however, one of the main challenges to become widely adopted is to optimize their design for maximum energy harvesting. In this paper, we investigated energy harvesting from a piezoelectric patch that is attached to a non-deterministic thin plate vibrating in bending. Energy harvesting from six patch shapes (differing in the number of edges) was examined through a coupled-field finite element model. The thin plate was simply supported with nominal geometry and material properties. The plate’s dynamics were randomized by randomly distributing point masses on its bottom surface; this made the plate a non-deterministic subsystem. The design optimization was performed by changing the shape of the piezoelectric patch and analyzing the ensemble response of the electrical potential across the piezoelectric patch. The results show that piezoelectric patches with an even number of edges exhibit higher performance in terms of energy harvesting.