Yuejuan Li

Date of Graduation

2014

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Type

PhD

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Marvin H Cheng

Committee Co-Chair

Larry E Banta

Committee Member

Guodong Guo

Committee Member

Hailin Li

Committee Member

Edward M Sabolsky

Abstract

Piezoelectric devices have been increasingly investigated as a means of converting ambient vibrations into electrical energy that can be stored and used to power other devices, such as the sensors/actuators, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) devices, and microprocessor units etc. The objective of this work was to design, fabricate, and test a piezoelectric device to harvest as much power as possible from vibration sources and effectively store the power in a battery.;The main factors determining the amount of collectable power of a single piezoelectric cantilever are its resonant frequency, operation mode and resistive load in the charging circuit. A proof mass was used to adjust the resonant frequency and operation mode of a piezoelectric cantilever by moving the mass along the cantilever. Due to the tiny amount of collected power, a capacitor was suggested in the charging circuit as an intermediate station. To harvest sufficient energy, a piezoelectric cantilever array, which integrates multiple cantilevers in parallel connection, was investigated.;In the past, most prior research has focused on the theoretical analysis of power generation instead of storing generated power in a physical device. In this research, a commercial solid-state battery was used to store the power collected by the proposed piezoelectric cantilever array. The time required to charge the battery up to 80% capacity using a constant power supply was 970 s. It took about 2400 s for the piezoelectric array to complete the same task. Other than harvesting energy from sinusoidal waveforms, a vibration source that emulates a real environment was also studied. In this research the response of a bridge-vehicle system was used as the vibration sources such a scenario is much closer to a real environment compared with typical lab setups.

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