Abstract:
Energy Harvesting is the process of capturing readily available energy and converting
into usable electrical energy. Among the many different types of energy harvesting
methods, piezoelectric energy harvesting has become popular as Piezoelectric materials
have the ability to transform mechanical energy into electrical energy. This research is
focused on obtaining and optimizing the output of commercially available piezoelectric
device which converts mechanical vibrations (starin) into usable electrical energy.
Moreover this research is focused on low vibrational frequency levels as normal
vibration sources in the environment such as building, machine, human body, and
vehicle have low frequency characteristics. In this research, output power of the
piezoelectric energy harvester is measured for different vibration frequencies with
different tip masses. By considering the experimental data, values for tip mass and
vibration frequency are suggested to extract the maximum power output from the energy
harvester in 0 to 50 Hz frequency range and 1.45 g to 6.45 g tip mass range.
