Abstract
In this study, we develop the mechanical metamaterial-enabled piezoelectric nanogenerators in the gyro-structure, which is reported as a novel green energy solution to generate electrical power under quasi-static excitations (i.e., <1 Hz) such as in the ocean environment. The plate-like mechanical metamaterials are designed with a hexagonal corrugation to improve their mechanical characteristics (i.e., effective bending stiffnesses), and the piezoelectric trips are bonded to the metaplates. The piezo-metaplates are placed in the sliding cells to obtain the post-buckling response for energy harvesting under low-frequency ocean motions. The corrugated mechanical metamaterials are fabricated using the three-dimensional additive manufacturing technique and are bonded with polyvinylidene fluoride strips, and the nanogenerator samples are investigated under the quasi-static loading. Theoretical and numerical models are developed to obtain the electrical power, and satisfactory agreements are observed. Optimization is conducted to maximize the generated electrical power with respect to the geometric consideration (i.e., changing the corrugation pattern of the mechanical metamaterials) and the material consideration (i.e., changing the mechanical metamaterials to anisotropic). In the end, we consider the piezoelectric nanogenerators as a potential green solution for the energy issues in other fields.
Highlights
Traditional energy sources, for example, disposable batteries, suffer from severe limitations given the difficulty, if not impossible, of regular replacement.[1]
The bi-walled piezo-MMs are designed in the gyro-structure, and the reported MM-GPENG can be activated under ocean waves in arbitrary directions
The piezoMM plate length and width are denoted as L and b, respectively, and the corrugation pattern consists of the diameter D, rib width W, and height hhex
Summary
Traditional energy sources, for example, disposable batteries, suffer from severe limitations given the difficulty, if not impossible, of regular replacement.[1] It is desirable to develop new energy solutions that continuously generate reliable electrical power. The effectiveness of vibration-based energy harvesting solutions was investigated for low-frequency ambient sources,[10] which indicated that excitation critically affects the efficiency of nonlinear harvesters. Piezo-based energy harvesters typically suffer from critical limits such as ineffective output power due to the narrow range of response frequency for piezoelectric materials. Because an environment typically exhibits significantly small vibration motions at very low frequency, different approaches have been proposed to increase the quasi-static ocean waves to relatively highfrequency accelerations such that the piezoelectric materials can be effectively activated. Piezoelectric beams were investigated under conditions, including cantilevered[11] and clamped−clamped[12] boundary conditions, or in bistable/
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