Design of a New Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Handrail With Vibration and Force Excitations

This paper presents the design, fabrication and testing of a new type of energy harvesting handrail. One uniqueness of the handrail energy harvester is that it has two working modes for collecting the energy excited by both vibration and pulling force during the operation. In order to enable good stability and anti-jamming ability for the energy harvester, a compound bridge-type compliant force amplifier is adopted and its parameters are optimized based on multi-objective genetic algorithm with finite-element analysis simulation. Analytical dynamic model is established for the piezoelectric device and the output power is calculated. A prototype harvester is fabricated for experimental investigation. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the derived analytical model. Moreover, results show that the maximum power output is up to under vibration excitation and 15 mW under random pulling force input. A series of the designed energy harvesters can be used to scavenge the energy generated by passengers in a bus or subway under different motion states.