This paper reviews energy harvesting technology from mechanical vibration. Recent advances on ultralow power portable electronic devices and wireless sensor network require limitless battery life for better performance. People searched for permanent portable power sources for advanced electronic devices. Energy is everywhere around us and the most important part in energy harvesting is energy transducer. Piezoelectric materials have high energy conversion ability from mechanical vibration. A great amount of researches have been conducted to develop simple and efficient energy harvesting devices from vibration by using piezoelectric materials. Representative piezoelectric materials can be categorized into piezoceramics and piezopolymers. This paper reviews key ideas and performances of the reported piezoelectric energy harvesting from vibration. Various types of vibration devices, piezoelectric materials and mathematical modeling of vibrational energy harvestings are reviewed.

A Review of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Based on Vibration

http://www.ssdsl.gatech.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/JSV_2011.pdf

Broadband piezoelectric power generation on high-energy orbits of the bistable Duffing oscillator with electromechanical coupling

The last two decades have witnessed several advances in microfabrication technologies and electronics, leading to the development of small, low-power devices for wireless sensing, data transmission, actuation, and medical implants. Unfortunately, the actual implementation of such devices in their respective environment has been hindered by the lack of scalable energy sources that are necessary to power and maintain them. Batteries, which remain the most commonly used power sources, have not kept pace with the demands of these devices, especially in terms of energy density. In light of this challenge, the concept of vibratory energy harvesting has flourished in recent years as a possible alternative to provide a continuous power supply. While linear vibratory energy harvesters have received the majority of the literature’s attention, a significant body of the current research activity is focused on the concept of purposeful inclusion of nonlinearities for broadband transduction. When compared to their linear resonant counterparts, nonlinear energy harvesters have a wider steady-state frequency bandwidth, leading to a common belief that they can be utilized to improve performance in ambient environments. Through a review of the open literature, this paper highlights the role of nonlinearities in the transduction of energy harvesters under different types of excitations and investigates the conditions, in terms of excitation nature and potential shape, under which such nonlinearities can be beneficial for energy harvesting. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4026278]

On the Role of Nonlinearities in Vibratory Energy Harvesting: A Critical Review and Discussion

The dramatic reduction in power consumption of current integrated circuits has evoked great research interests in harvesting ambient energy, such as vibrations, as a potential power supply for electronic devices to avoid battery replacement. Currently, most vibration-based energy harvesters are designed as linear resonators to achieve optimal performance by matching their resonance frequencies with the ambient excitation frequencies a priori. However, a slight shift of the excitation frequency will cause a dramatic reduction in performance. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of practical cases, the ambient vibrations are frequency-varying or totally random with energy distributed over a wide frequency spectrum. Hence, developing techniques to increase the bandwidth of vibration-based energy harvesters has become the next important problem in energy harvesting. This article reviews the advances made in the past few years on this issue. The broadband vibration-based energy harvesting solutions, covering re...

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Toward Broadband Vibration-based Energy Harvesting

This paper presents a state-of-the-art review on a hot topic in the literature, i.e., vibration based energy harvesting techniques, including theory, modelling methods and the realizations of the piezoelectric, electromagnetic and electrostatic approaches. To minimize the requirement of external power source and maintenance for electric devices such as wireless sensor networks, the energy harvesting technique based on vibrations has been a dynamic field of studying interest over past years. One important limitation of existing energy harvesting techniques is that the power output performance is seriously subject to the resonant frequencies of ambient vibrations, which are often random and broadband. To solve this problem, researchers have concentrated on developing efficient energy harvesters by adopting new materials and optimising the harvesting devices. Particularly, among these approaches, different types of energy harvesters have been designed with consideration of nonlinear characteristics so that the frequency bandwidth for effective energy harvesting of energy harvesters can be broadened. This paper reviews three main and important vibration-to-electricity conversion mechanisms, their design theory or methods and potential applications in the literature. As one of important factors to estimate the power output performance, the energy conversion efficiency of different conversion mechanisms is also summarised. Finally, the challenging issues based on the existing methods and future requirement of energy harvesting are discussed.

A comprehensive review on vibration energy harvesting: Modelling and realization

Cantilevered piezoelectric energy harvesters have been extensively investigated in the literature of energy harvesting. As an alternative to conventional cantilevered beams, this article presents the L-shaped beam-mass structure as a new piezoelectric energy harvester configuration. This structure can be tuned to have the first two natural frequencies relatively close to each other, resulting in the possibility of a broader band energy harvesting system. This article describes the important features of the L-shaped piezoelectric energy harvester configuration and develops a linear distributed parameter model for predicting the electromechanically coupled voltage response and displacement response of the harvester structure. After deriving the coupled distributed parameter model, a case study is presented to investigate the electrical power generation performance of the L-shaped energy harvester. A direct application of the L-shaped piezoelectric energy harvester configuration is proposed for use as landing gears in unmanned air vehicle applications and a case study is presented where the results of the L-shaped — energy harvester — landing gear are favorably compared against the published experimental results of a curved beam configuration used for the same purpose.

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Modeling of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting from an L-shaped Beam-mass Structure with an Application to UAVs:

On the optimal energy harvesting from a vibration source

On the forced response of waveguides using the wave and finite element method

Calculation of reflection and transmission coefficients of joints using a hybrid finite element/wave and finite element approach

The behavior of many mechanical systems, such as overhead cranes, can be predicted through intuitive observation of their motion under various forces. Mathematical modeling of an overhead crane sho...

Jamil M. Renno

Papers

Modeling of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting from an L-shaped Beam-mass Structure with an Application to UAVs:

On the optimal energy harvesting from a vibration source

On the forced response of waveguides using the wave and finite element method

Calculation of reflection and transmission coefficients of joints using a hybrid finite element/wave and finite element approach

Generalized Design of an Anti-Swing Fuzzy Logic Controller for an Overhead Crane with Hoist