On a nonlinear broadband piezoelectric energy harvester with a coupled beam array

A conventional energy harvester usually has narrow operational bandwidth, which makes it difficult to harvest energy with varying frequencies in the actual field. Herein, a nonlinear piezoelectric energy harvester with a coupled beam array is designed to broaden bandwidth and improve energy harvesting performance. The proposed harvester consists of a base, two elastic supports, and four piezoelectric beams with different natural frequencies. Due to the coupling effect caused by the two elastic supports, the four piezoelectric beams have large output voltages not only at their own natural frequencies, but also at the natural frequencies of other beams. Meanwhile, the two elastic supports enable the four piezoelectric beams to become nonlinear beams, which also contributes to operational bandwidth broadening. Next, the equivalent mass-spring-damping model and governing equations of the harvester are obtained, based on the lumped-parameter method. A strong coupling is found to occur when the equivalent stiffness of the elastic support is small. Subsequently, a fabricated prototype and an experiment platform are utilized to measure the energy harvesting performance of the harvester. Under 1 g up-sweep excitation, the average output power of the harvester from 40 Hz to 80 Hz is 144.2 % higher and the bandwidth is 93.3 % wider than those of the non-coupled multi-resonance harvester, which houses four beams separately. Finally, actual applicability of the proposed energy harvester is evaluated by operating a Bluetooth location tracking Internet of Things (IoT) device without a battery. Besides, the fabricated prototype is applied to the vehicle engine where the frequencies of vibration sources change rapidly with time and velocity. The field test argues that the harvester can be used in unstable or varying conditions, where a typical vibration energy harvester may not work efficiently, due to its limited operational bandwidth.