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.
Recommended Citation
Li, Yuejuan, "Modeling and Tuning of Energy Harvesting Device Using Piezoelectric Cantilever Array" (2014). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 6068.
https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/6068
