Vibration-based piezoelectric micropower generator for power plant wireless monitoring application

This paper investigates the factors affecting the performance of a vibration based micropower generator for a power plant wireless monitoring application. A bimorph bender, one of micropower generator methods, was used in this work. The ANSYS program was used to study the distribution of stress-strain in each model design, and MATLAB was used to simulate and investigate the extracted power. Triangular, rectangular and trapezoidal cantilevers were chosen to analyse the effect of the bender shape on the power produced. The tests were conducted using the same input excitation conditions (10 m/s(2)), frequency range of (50-150 Hz). The effect of the configuration arrangement (horizontal and vertical) of the PZT bimorph cantilever on the power generation (poling series) was also investigated. The simulation result showed that the maximum stress-strain value was produced in the triangular bender shape with equal distribution on all the surface areas. The measurements' results showed that the triangular cantilever produced maximum power compared to other bender shapes for both horizontal and vertical directions and single test. The horizontal and vertical arrangements of the cantilevers showed that the vertical arrangement could produce more power than the horizontal arrangement. The experimental results showed concurrence with theoretical models. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.