Study on a Novel Tunable Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Structure

Abstract

This research proposes a novel piezoelectric harvester structure which is constructed by a cantilever base beam and piezoelectric elements bonded with the base beam in a certain manner. By changing the electrical boundary conditions of the piezoelectric elements, the resonant frequency of the beam structure changes accordingly. Two kinds of manners in which piezoelectric elements are bonded with the beam are investigated and compared with ANSYS simulations and experiments. The results showed that the embedded manner surpasses the surface-bonded manner with the frequency variation ratio of 3.17%.