Design and characterization of scalable woven piezoelectric energy harvester for wearable applications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a piezoelectric energy harvester with a fabric textile structure for wearable applications and examine its design and characteristics as a scalable energy harvester. The device is composed of warp and weft threads made of yarn strings and piezoelectric film straps, respectively, that are woven to each other to form a stretchable textile structure. The area of the prototype device, consisting of five weft and eleven warp threads, is 15 × 33 mm2. During the stretching operation, the curvature change and resultant time-varying strain in the piezoelectric weft threads induce output power. We demonstrate that a large-area device for wearable application can be easily obtained using the proposed structure, and the output power can be increased by reducing the thread dimension and consequently increasing the density of the threads. Maximum power densities of 81 and 125 μW cm−2 were obtained from the device using warp-thread diameters of 5 and 3 mm, respectively.