Design of a New Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Handrail With Vibration and Force Excitations

Zhenjing Li,Lap Mou Tam,Qingsong Xu

doi:10.1109/access.2019.2948085

Zhenjing Li, Lap Mou Tam + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2019.2948085

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Abstract

This paper presents the design, fabrication and testing of a new type of energy harvesting handrail. One uniqueness of the handrail energy harvester is that it has two working modes for collecting the energy excited by both vibration and pulling force during the operation. In order to enable good stability and anti-jamming ability for the energy harvester, a compound bridge-type compliant force amplifier is adopted and its parameters are optimized based on multi-objective genetic algorithm with finite-element analysis simulation. Analytical dynamic model is established for the piezoelectric device and the output power is calculated. A prototype harvester is fabricated for experimental investigation. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the derived analytical model. Moreover, results show that the maximum power output is up to 150 μW under vibration excitation and 15 mW under random pulling force input. A series of the designed energy harvesters can be used to scavenge the energy generated by passengers in a bus or subway under different motion states.

Highlights

With rapid development of Internet of Things, more and more miniaturized and low-power electronic products have entered into our daily life
The proposed energy harvesting handrail is composed of a bridge-type force amplifier with embedded piezoelectric stack and an outer protection frame
The handrail mainly consists of the clip, force amplifier, piezoelectric stack, and protection frame for collecting the energy generated during the bus driving

Summary

INTRODUCTION

With rapid development of Internet of Things, more and more miniaturized and low-power electronic products have entered into our daily life. The motivation of the current research is to develop an energy harvester to be used with handrail in public vehicles for scavenging energy from vibration and force excitations. The handrail energy harvester can be installed on a bus/subway with high practicability To this end, a new energy harvesting handrail with two working modes is designed and developed in this work, which can collect the vibration energy during the driving of the bus, and the pulling force energy produced by the passenger. The proposed energy harvesting handrail is composed of a bridge-type force amplifier with embedded piezoelectric stack and an outer protection frame. The main contribution of the work lies in the design of a novel piezoelectric harvesting device for scavenging energy from both vibration and force excitations.

MECHANISM DESIGN

PROTOTYPE FABRICATION AND EXPERIMENTAL TESTING RESULTS

Findings

CONCLUSION