Vibration Based Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting
Piezoelectric energy harvesting has applications in aircraft technology, where the piezoelectric patches are attached to the wings of the aircraft to convert the mechanical vibrations into useful electrical energy, which further is used to power the sensors of Aircraft Health Monitoring System, inflight operations like lighting and onboard entertainment. In this article, the performance of vibration based piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) for a given frequency range is studied. A piezoelectric material that has a maximum piezoelectric coefficient (PZT-G1195) is chosen to increase the effective power output. The output power generated by the harvester due to transverse and longitudinal vibrations are compared. Finally parametric studies are performed on the PEH to analyze the design parameters influencing its performance.