An Experimental Study on Macro Piezoceramic Fiber Composites for Energy Harvesting

Abstract

During the last decades, composite materials are being widely used in a variety of applications. Recently, a type of composite materials with piezoelectric fibers has been introduced for energy harvesting. This study presents an experimental study about composite materials with Piezoceramic fibers for energy harvesting. For this purpose, Macro Fiber Composite (MFC) layers were attached to the surface of metal substrates to form a unimorph harvester. In addition, to investigate the effect of substrate geometrical imperfection on output power, unimorph harvester with notched corners are studied. The output voltage and power were measured during different base excitations. Voltage frequency spectrum and output power as a function of load resistance are analyzed. Results show that the power density for the MFC harvester is 10.37 [μW/cm3.g2] when vibrating on its fundamental natural frequency with current of 50 [μA], which are relatively higher than previous studies.