The last decade has witnessed significant advances in energy harvesting technologies as a possible alternative to provide a continuous power supply for small, low-power devices in applications, such as wireless sensing, data transmission, actuation, and medical implants. Piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) has been a salient topic in the literature and has attracted widespread attention from researchers due to its advantages of simple architecture, high power density, and good scalability. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art of piezoelectric energy harvesting. Various key aspects to improve the overall performance of a PEH device are discussed, including basic fundamentals and configurations, materials and fabrication, performance enhancement mechanisms, applications, and future outlooks.

A comprehensive review on piezoelectric energy harvesting technology: Materials, mechanisms, and applications

It is widely known that the availability of lightweight structures with excellent energy absorption capacity is essential for numerous engineering applications. Inspired by many biological structures in nature, bio-inspired structures have been proved to exhibit a significant improvement over conventional structures in energy absorption capacity. Therefore, use of the biomimetic approach for designing novel lightweight structures with excellent energy absorption capacity has been increasing in engineering fields in recent years. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of recent advances in the development of bio-inspired structures for energy absorption applications. In particular, we describe the unique features and remarkable mechanical properties of biological structures such as plants and animals, which can be mimicked to design efficient energy absorbers. Next, we review and discuss the structural designs as well as the energy absorption characteristics of current bio-inspired structures with different configurations and structures, including multi-cell tubes, frusta, sandwich panels, composite plates, honeycombs, foams, building structures and lattices. These materials have been used for bio-inspired structures, including but not limited to metals, polymers, fibre-reinforced composites, concrete and glass. We also discussed the manufacturing techniques of bio-inspired structures based on conventional methods, and adaptive manufacturing (3D printing). Finally, contemporary challenges and future directions for bio-inspired structures are presented. This synopsis provides a useful platform for researchers and engineers to create novel designs of bio-inspired structures for energy absorption applications.

A review of recent research on bio-inspired structures and materials for energy absorption applications

Aeroelastic energy harvesting: A review

Mechanical design and multifunctional applications of chiral mechanical metamaterials: A review

Harvesting ambient wind energy with an inverted piezoelectric flag

A review of modelling and analysis of morphing wings

Energy harvesting by means of flow-induced vibrations on aerospace vehicles

Aeroelastic dynamic response and control of an airfoil section with control surface nonlinearities

Theoretical and experimental study of a piezoelectric flapping wing rotor for micro aerial vehicle

Thin-walled tubular structures are commonly used in automotive and aerospace applications because of their high strength and lightweight characteristics. In this paper we propose a new bionic bi-tubular thin-walled structure (BBTS) inspired from the internal structure of the lady beetle elytron. Six types of BBTSs with different geometric parameters and same type of material were simulated under axial dynamic impact loading with a weight of 500 kg and a velocity of 10 m/s using nonlinear finite elements. The comparison between BBTSs with equal mass shows that the thickness of the inner wall and the cross-sectional configurations influence significantly the energy absorption of the structure. BBTSs show an optimized crashworthiness behavior when the inner wall thickness is between 1.6 and 2.0 mm. In addition, circular and octangular BBTSs show improved absorption characteristics when the inner wall thickness is 2.0 mm. We also evaluate the energy absorption of periodically distributed BBTS against cellular configuration with irregular topology. The energy absorption characteristic of BBTS with regular distribution is better than that of BBTS with irregular distribution, which indicates that the optimized regular structure has an improved mechanical performance to the original bionic topology.

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Daochun Li

Papers

A review of modelling and analysis of morphing wings

Energy harvesting by means of flow-induced vibrations on aerospace vehicles

Aeroelastic dynamic response and control of an airfoil section with control surface nonlinearities

Theoretical and experimental study of a piezoelectric flapping wing rotor for micro aerial vehicle

Numerical analysis of the impact resistance in aluminum alloy bi-tubular thin-walled structures designs inspired by beetle elytra