A performance-enhanced energy harvester for low frequency vibration utilizing a corrugated cantilevered beam

This note proposes a performance-enhanced piezoelectric energy harvester by replacing a conventional flat cantilevered beam with a corrugated beam. It consists of a proof mass and a sinusoidally or trapezoidally corrugated cantilevered beam covered by a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) film. Compared to the conventional energy harvester of the same size, it has a more flexible bending stiffness and a larger bonding area of the PVDF layer, so higher output voltage from the device can be expected. In order to investigate the characteristics of the proposed energy harvester, analytical developments and numerical simulations on its natural frequency and tip displacement are carried out. Shaking table tests are also conducted to verify the performance of the proposed device. It is clearly shown from the tests that the proposed energy harvester not only has a lower natural frequency than an equivalent sized standard energy harvester, but also generates much higher output voltage than the standard one.