Design and experimental investigation of an asymmetric piezoelectric energy harvester based on galloping

Abstract

This article presents an asymmetric piezoelectric energy harvester for scavenging wind energy at low wind speed. The piezoelectric beam undergoes bending and torsional vibration simultaneously caused by eccentric distance. The different asymmetric experimental prototypes are made to investigate the performance of the proposed energy harvester. The results show that the threshold wind speed is negatively correlated with the offset distance. And the output power decreases with the increase of eccentric distance, which requires a tradeoff between the onset wind speed and power. When the eccentric distance is 0 mm, the maximum output power of the energy harvester can reach 3.822 mW.