Experimental Investigation of Performance Characteristics of PZT-5A with Application to Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

In the previous couple of decades, techniques to reap energy and empower low voltage electronic devices have received outstanding attention. Most of the methods based on the piezoelectric effect to harvest the energy from ambient vibrations have been revolutionized. There’s an absence of experiment-based investigation which incorporates the microstructure analysis and crystal morphology of those energy harvest home materials. Moreover, the impact of variable mechanical and thermal load conditions has seldom been studied within the previous literature to utilize the effectiveness of those materials in several practical applications like structural health monitoring (SHM), etc. In the proposed research work, scanning electron microscope (SEM) and energy dispersive x-ray (EDX) analysis are performed to examine the inside crystal morphology of PZT-5A and ensure the quality of the piezoelectric ceramic. Further, the performance of piezoelectric vibration-based energy harvester has been investigated in the second phase of current research work under the variable mechanical and thermal load conditions through a regular series of experiments. It’s been found that the output voltage of piezoelectric sensors will increase by increasing the applied load, whereas a decreasing trend in output voltage is noticed by increasing the applied temperature, resistance and frequency. Within the third part, a measuring setup is developed in the laboratory to further investigate the effectiveness of PZT-5A in practical applications such as electromechanical impedance (EMI) based structural health monitoring under the controlled heating environment. Therefore, this analysis not only evaluates the performance of PZT sensors under the variable operating conditions but also encourages developing a temperature compensation approach in EMI-based SHM.