Experimental-numerical analyses on energy harvesting characteristics of non-conventional T-shaped beams with varied piezoelectric patch location and anchor position

Abstract

Recently, researchers have studied innovative beam structures in a quest to maximize the energy conversion capability of piezoelectric (PZT) transducers coupled with the shims. A T-shaped beam is one of the structural elements used for harvester design owing to its exceptional geometrical advantage. While a number of research papers have reported its performance characteristics, its potential for harnessing the vibration energy at much lower resonance frequency and damping has not been explored. This paper presents non-conventional T-shaped beam harvesters, namely, the Uniform Tapered T-shaped Beam (UTB) and the Reversed Tapered T-shaped Beam (RTB), with the purpose of enhancing the T-shaped beam functionality. A performance analysis between the UTB, RTB and a conventional T-shaped beam (CTB) harvester of equal mass was conducted, where experimental results show that the RTB harvester has a lower fundamental resonance frequency of 12.3% and 28.3% when compared to the CTB and UTB, respectively. Also, a maximum terminal voltage of 82.8 V and an output peak power of 4.6 mW were produced by the RTB harvester when the PZT patch was placed near its clamped end. In addition, we investigated the effect of the anchor position of the beams on their energy harvesting performance using a finite element analysis (FEA) tool. The numerical results show that the position of the anchor has a considerable effect on the overall characteristics of the configurations.