Effect of simultaneous use of two different piezoelectric materials on the performance of cavity based segmented doubly clamped piezoelectric energy harvester

Abstract

From the past several decades, energy harvesting using piezoelectric materials has emerged as a potential technique in scavenging electrical energy from environmental low frequency vibrations. In this direction, a cantilever type piezoelectric energy harvester is observed to be the most appropriate structure that constitutes a substrate layer over which one or two layers of same piezoelectric material and a proof mass are embedded. In this paper, the performance of cavity based segmented doubly clamped piezoelectric energy harvester (C-SDC-PEH) has been analyzed for simultaneous use of two piezoelectric materials (PMN-35 wt% PT and PZT-5H) using COMSOL Multiphysics software. Here, the C-SDC-PEH device encompasses the advantages of doubly clamped boundary conditions, cavity inclusion, electrodes and piezoelectric layers segmentation. Also, from observations PMN-35 wt% PT - PZT-5H - PMN-35 wt% PT placing format is found to be most appropriate combination of piezoelectric materials corresponding to which improved values of output voltage (251.2 V), mechanical power (235.7 mW) and electrical power (201.2 m W) have been attained at low (71 Hz) resonant frequency.