Modeling and Simulation of Dual Beams Hybrid Energy Harvester for Bridge’s Health Monitoring Systems

Abstract

From last few decades, the piezoelectric materials are widely used in the field of structural health monitoring because of its ability for voltage dependent actuation. This paper presents the analytical modeling and simulation of a hybrid (electromagnetic and piezoelectric) energy harvester (having nonlinear behavior) that generates power from vibrations of bridges for structure health monitoring systems. The modeled hybrid energy harvester is comprised of two beams and two tip masses attached to the ends of both beams. Beam 1 consists of a piezoelectric layer and a substrate layer while beam 2 contains a coil and permanent magnet. The two beams are assembled with a specific L shaped geometry. Base excitations are provided in the transverse direction of the first beam of the harvester. The L-shape structure is modeled as a continuous system rather than a lumped-mass system to investigate the dynamic behavior of the structure in more detailed manner. The simulation is performed for both parallel as well as series combinations of the piezoelectric layers. In the case of a parallel combination of piezoelectric layers’ maximum voltage of 1.66 V is obtained at the resonance frequency of the structure with 0.2 g acceleration level which resulted in the corresponding power of 65.61 µW. However, in the case of series combination simulation resulted in the production of the maximum voltage of 1.95 V and a corresponding power of 90.54 µW at 0.2 g acceleration level.