Most work from the last decade on the piezoelectric vibration energy harvester (PVEHs) focuses on how to increase its frequency bandwidth but ignores the effect of vibration direction on the output performance of the harvester. However, both the frequency and the direction of the vibration in a real environment are time-variant. Therefore, improving the capability of PVEH to harvest multi-directional vibration energy is also important. This work presents a direction self-tuning two-dimensional (2D) PVEH, which consists of a spring-mass system and a direction self-tuning structure. The spring-mass system is sensitive to external vibration, and the direction self-tuning structure can automatically adjust its plane perpendicular to the direction of the external excitation driven by an external torque. The direction self-tuning mechanism is first theoretically analyzed. The experimental results show that this direction self-tuning PVEH can efficiently scavenge vibration energy in the 2D plane, and its output performance is unaffected by vibration direction and is very stable. Meanwhile, the effect of the initial deflection angle and the vibration acceleration on the direction self-tuning time of the PVEH is investigated. The direction self-tuning mechanism can also be used in other PVEHs with different energy conversion methods for harvesting multi-direction vibration energy.
A Direction Self-Tuning Two-Dimensional Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvester