Design and Evaluation of a Piezoelectric Energy Harvester Produced with a Finite Element Method

Abstract

Piezoelectric energy harvesting uses piezoelectric, which is able to convert unused mechanical vibration energy to electrical energy, such as with motor and machinery. The piezoelectric energy harvester was constructed with a cantilever made of lead zirconate titanate with a metal plate. The primary material was soft lead zirconium titanate (PZT-5H) due to the large strain availability, acceptable mechanical strength and high piezoelectric constant. This technique's drawback is that the energy efficiency is lower than the other energy harvesting methods, but this study increases the output electric power efficiency by analyzing a finite element method for the structure of the piezoelectric energy harvester. We manufactured two cantilever types as follows: the L-60 and L-33 bimorph piezoelectric energy harvesters. Their resulting energy harvesters were able to obtain high voltage values as follows: 27.4 mV and 40.6 mV. Moreover, these results have a similar band of resonance frequency it comparison to the simulation. Consequently, this study was confirmed with validity. The output electric powers of the L-60 and L-33 types have 3.1 mW/s and 5.8 mW/s with 47 Hz and 148 Hz of resonance frequency and then, the load resistivities were <TEX>$100k\Omega$</TEX> and <TEX>$10k\Omega$</TEX>, respectively.