Vibration based T-shaped piezoelectric cantilever beam design using finite element method for energy harvesting devices

Abstract

Ambient mechanical vibration energy can be converted into electrical energy using one of the most promising mechanism known as piezoelectric mechanism. In the mechanism, mechanical stress and strain generation in the piezoelectric materials can be converted into electrical energy which can be used for low power electronic devices. In this work, a T-shaped piezoelectric cantilever beam was analysed. The geometry of the cantilever beam was designed using SolidWorks. After that, the cantilever beam was simulated using Finite Element Method (FEM) in COMSOL Multiphysics. In the FEM simulation, the beam was kept under a vibration sources of 1g acceleration. As a result, maximum displacement at free end of the beam was found 2.47mm at resonant frequency of 238.75Hz. As piezoelectric energy harvesting from vibration depends on stress generation in piezoelectric materials, stress was analysed for the beam. The maximum amount of stress near the clamped end of the beam was found 2.39×10 ⁸ N/m ₂ at resonance. The investigation showed that the designed and analysed T-shaped beam can be operated in low-frequency ambient vibration sources.