Analysis and Simulation of Multi-Stepped and Multi-Folded Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

In recent years, the development in the area of wideband piezoelectric energy harvesters enabled the possibility to scavenge electrical energy from a wide range of vibrational frequencies. In this direction, this paper proposed a multi-stepped and multi-folded structure of piezoelectric energy harvester to efficiently harvest the electrical energy from a wide range of low frequency vibrations. Here, the substrate beam is folded into eight segments and every segment consists of a layer of piezoelectric material. The proposed structure is featured with the advantages of long substrate length, large strain, wide bandwidth and results in appropriate values of voltage and output power response. The finite element analysis (FEA) of proposed structure shows five resonant peaks within 0–300 Hz frequency range with 2.75 V and 3780 μW maximum values of voltage and power response at 80 Hz resonant frequency.