Experimental Study of a Piezoelectric Strain-Based Energy Harvester for Intelligent Tires of Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, autonomous vehicles are at the forefront of the vehicle industry’s attention. Due to the fact that autonomous vehicles are driverless, the safety of these type of vehicles is more important to ensure the passengers safety. To improve the vehicle safety, intelligent tires can be used to provide tire and tire-pavement condition information to the autonomous vehicle control system. For this purpose, intelligent tires are equipped with different sensors such as temperature, pressure, wear and friction. These sensors need a sustainable and reliable power source so that the autonomous vehicle control system has access to the tire information at any conditions. Energy harvesters are proven to be applicable for tire waste strain energy harvesting to provide power for small on-board electronics. In this paper a strain-based energy harvester with the use of piezoelectric material is built and experimentally tested. A measurement system with wireless communication is also developed for online reading of the piezoelectric voltage and power. It is experimentally observed that the generated power by the piezoelectric energy harvester is enough to run the sensors tire. The effects of tire inflation pressure and normal load are also studied on the piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) output voltage.