Effect of Materials on the Performance of Multi-Resonant Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

The development in the area of resonant and multi-resonant piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) has opened the doors for self powered devices. In the direction of extracting energy over the wide frequency range under low acceleration values, this paper introduced a L-shaped and straight branches based nonlinear multi-resonant PEH. The main objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of different materials on the performance of proposed structure. This paper starts with the device description and modeling of the proposed structure. Further, certain simulations have been conducted to analyze the output voltage and power response of nonlinear multi-resonant PEH corresponding to different piezoelectric and substrate materials. It has been observed that the use of either PZT-5A or PZT-5H piezoelectric material within the proposed structure would be a good choice that results in improved values of output voltage and power response below 10 Hz frequency range. However, while considering copper or silicon substrate material in place of aluminium, the forward shift in resonant frequencies has been observed along with improved values of voltage and power responses.