Effectiveness Testing of a Piezoelectric Energy Harvester for an Automobile Wheel Using Stochastic Resonance.

Yunshun Zhang,Rencheng Zheng,Keisuke Shimono,Kimihiko Nakano,Tsutomu Kaizuka

doi:10.3390/s16101727

Yunshun Zhang, Rencheng Zheng + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s16101727

Copy DOI

Abstract

The collection of clean power from ambient vibrations is considered a promising method for energy harvesting. For the case of wheel rotation, the present study investigates the effectiveness of a piezoelectric energy harvester, with the application of stochastic resonance to optimize the efficiency of energy harvesting. It is hypothesized that when the wheel rotates at variable speeds, the energy harvester is subjected to on-road noise as ambient excitations and a tangentially acting gravity force as a periodic modulation force, which can stimulate stochastic resonance. The energy harvester was miniaturized with a bistable cantilever structure, and the on-road noise was measured for the implementation of a vibrator in an experimental setting. A validation experiment revealed that the harvesting system was optimized to capture power that was approximately 12 times that captured under only on-road noise excitation and 50 times that captured under only the periodic gravity force. Moreover, the investigation of up-sweep excitations with increasing rotational frequency confirmed that stochastic resonance is effective in optimizing the performance of the energy harvester, with a certain bandwidth of vehicle speeds. An actual-vehicle experiment validates that the prototype harvester using stochastic resonance is capable of improving power generation performance for practical tire application.

Highlights

With the increasing requirements of advanced driving assistance systems, researchers have developed a tire-pressure monitoring system that can provide the driver with the tire condition via wireless transmission [1,2,3]
Considering on-road noise and periodic acceleration by gravity for vehicle traveling on a paved road, the present study focuses on the effectiveness testing of a piezoelectric energy harvester on vehicle tires using stochastic resonance, and the energy harvesting characteristics are comprehensively investigated through simulation and laboratory experimental analyses
The present study applied the periodic gravity force and on-road noise excitation of the rotating wheel to validate the effectiveness of periodic energy harvesting by the of theexcitation phenomenon of

Summary

Introduction

With the increasing requirements of advanced driving assistance systems, researchers have developed a tire-pressure monitoring system that can provide the driver with the tire condition via wireless transmission [1,2,3]. The present paper proposes a piezoelectric energy harvester for rotating automobile wheels, and focuses on experimental testing under on-road noise excitations to improve the harvesting efficiency through the application of stochastic resonance. A linearly piezoelectric energy harvester using a cantilever beam has been proposed, where the centrifugal force is used to stimulate the natural frequency of the energy harvester system. A linear MEMS energy harvester using tire shock excitations was proposed for automotive applications; it can extract more energy only in the case of high-speed driving, and the energy harvesting efficiency depends on the concave-convex condition of the road surface [6]. A linear energy harvester was presented to optimize the frequency band of operation based on a feedback loop control system [8]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion