Investigation of Soft and Hard Ceramics and Single Crystals for Resonant and Off-Resonant Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

Abstract

Piezoelectric materials have received the most attention for vibration-to-electricity conversion over the last decade. Harmonic excitation is the most commonly investigated form of excitation in piezoelectric energy harvesting and it can be divided into two subgroups as resonant and off-resonant excitations. Although resonant excitation is preferred for extracting the maximum electrical power output from the device, there are several practical cases where it is not possible to excite the energy harvester at its resonance frequency (e.g. varying frequency excitations or very low frequency excitations where the input frequency is much lower than the fundamental resonance frequency). Several researchers have used soft piezoceramics (e.g. PZT-5A and PZT-5H) for power generation under resonant excitation. Typically, these soft piezoceramics have larger piezoelectric strain constant and larger elastic compliance compared to hard piezoceramics (e.g. PZT-4 and PZT-8). However, it is known that hard piezoceramics can have an order of magnitude larger mechanical quality factor compared to soft piezoceramics. Consequently, hard piezoceramics can generate more power under resonant excitation even though researchers have mostly focused on the soft piezoceramics. On the other hand, soft piezoceramics can generate more power for low frequency excitation below the resonance frequency due to their large effective piezoelectric stress constants. This difference is also the case for soft and hard single crystals (e.g. soft PMN-PZT versus hard PMN-PZT-Mn). In addition, single crystals can generate more power than ceramics at low off-resonant frequencies due to their large dynamic flexibilities (which is related to their large elastic compliances). This work investigates the specific advantages of soft and hard piezoceramics and single crystals for vibration-based energy harvesting. An experimentally validated piezoelectric energy harvester model is used to compare the power generation performances of soft and hard ceramics as well as soft and hard single crystals. The soft and the hard piezoceramics considered in this work are PZT-5H and PZT-8, respectively, while the soft and the hard single crystals considered here are PMN-PZT and PMN-PZT-Mn, respectively.