Experimental and theory study on a stacked piezoelectric energy harvester for pressure pulsation in water hydraulic system

Abstract

A novel stacked piezoelectric energy harvester is proposed to solve the sustainable power supply problem of wireless sensors in water hydraulic system, and two energy conversion models are established. The effects of connection modes and pressure pulsation parameters on the energy harvesting performance are studied. The results show that the model without considering the influence of electric field is more consistent with the experimental results. There is an optimal resistance to obtain the maximum average power, and the optimum resistance in series connection is n2 times of that in parallel connection when the number of piezoelectric ceramic disks is n. The root mean square voltage increases with the pressure pulsation amplitude, and the average power are proportional to the square of pulsation amplitude. The ability of the energy harvester is significantly improved as the pressure pulsation frequency increases from 40 Hz to 80 Hz, but the theoretical results exhibit some errors at low frequency due to the inaccuracy of replacing measured pressure with sinusoidal waveform. Using the pressure pulsation with multiple frequency components as input can improve the accuracy of model. This paper provides new ideas for the design of stacked piezoelectric energy harvester in water hydraulic system.