Modelling of a Low Frequency Based Rectangular Shape Piezoelectric Cantilever Beam for Energy Harvesting Applications

Abstract

Harvesting few amount of charge from environmental ambient sources namely, wind, thermal, heat, vibration, solar utilizing micro scale energy harvesting devices, offers vast view of powering for numerous portable low power electronic devices. However, power harvesting using piezoelectric crystal from low power ambient source nowdays has increasing popularity with the advantages of low cost, long life time, stability and clean energy.  Recent trends have shown that most researchers are interested in designing a low resonance frequency vibration based energy harvesting devices despite of its challenges ahead. In this paper, a low frequency based rectangular shape piezoelectric cantilever beam has been developed for energy harvesting applications. The proposed vibration based low frequency cantilever beam using piezoelectric element has been developed by finite element analysis (FEA) employing COMSOL Multiphysics platform. The main goal of the study is to analyze the outcome of geometric model of a piezoelectric cantilever beam and to calculate the resonance frequency of the structure according to its length. The material of PZT-5H, has been considered to enhance the efficiency of the low frequency based cantilever beam. Finally, the proposed result is compared with other existing works.