Development and Performance Analysis of a Low Cost Experimental Set Up for Piezoelectric Based Energy Harvester Using Loudspeaker

Abstract

In this paper we have implemented a Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) based energy harvester system using a speaker based vibration set-up. The vibration energy of the cantilever is harvested using commercially available piezoelectric sensor and the acceleration is measured by an accelerometer. Theoretical analysis of vibration as well as experimental validation has been carried out. The energy harvester is capable of extracting sufficient energy at low environmental vibration within the frequency range of 23 Hz to 35 Hz. With application of 465 mN, the cantilever deflects around 2 mm and the output of piezo sensor is 4.32 Vpp while the accelerometer output is 2.88 Vpp. It is observed that for a limited range of frequency the low cost speaker has a linear behaviour. The maximum power is achieved as 782 µW with load resistance of 3.3 kΩ using the current set-up and it can be utilised for energy harvesting within the specific range of frequencies.