An Experimental Power Generation Evaluation of Cantilever Type of Piezoelectric Vibration Energy Harvester

Rotating machinery is widely used in the industrial plant, for example, power plant, chemical plant, mass-production plant and so on. In order to ensure safety operation of the rotating machinery, vibration condition monitoring of the machinery can play a crucial role. Authors have proposed a cantilever type of vibration energy harvester for vibration condition monitoring applications of rotating machinery. Proposed energy harvester consisted of Macro-Fiber Composite (MFC) which is flexible and durable piezocomposite type actuator. The mechanical resonant frequency of the piezoelectric bimorph cantilever is tuned to the rotating speed of a typical 4-pole induction motor driven rotating machine. In this study, the power generation performance of proposed energy harvester is evaluated through numerical simulations as well as experiment when subjected to vibration source input magnitude of 0.71(mm/s rms) at the resonant frequency of the harvester by using the electrodynamic shaker.