Wideband piezoelectric energy harvester for condition monitoring in power plant application

Abstract

Recent advances in the wireless applications have demanded the need for continuous supply of power to power up wireless sensor network. Some possible applications of wireless sensor network vary from detecting formation of crack on aircraft, controlling temperature and light in the energy efficient building even in manufacturing process equipment. The wireless sensor device which uses battery can cause problems when the wireless nodes are large in number and when the nodes are placed in the difficult area to access. Thus, it is advantageous for a device to be capable of extracting energy from the environment, making it self-powered, self-sustaining and lowering overall cost of the wireless network. Improvement in integrated circuit (IC) technology has made the overall power consumption of circuit very small which leads to a very promising application of the vibration based micro power generator. This paper focuses on the design of the wideband piezoelectric energy harvester for condition monitoring in power plant application. The generator uses the piezoelectric PZT of type PSI-5A-S4-ENH to transform ambient vibrations into electrical energy. The frequency range of the wideband piezoelectric energy harvester is within 50 Hz to 150 Hz. Different factors affecting the performance such as the shape factor is also investigated. Some experimental results are presented and compared to the previous similar work.