Investigation of low wind harvesting system using micro piezoelectric materials

Abstract

The art of energy harvesting using non-renewable resources such as solar energy, wind energy, bio energy is encouraged due to the increase in global energy demand and increase in pollution. Various research methods are proposed in the interdisciplinary areas to harvest wind energy using latest micro-scale sensor materials. Utmost interest is received in harvesting wind energy using piezoelectric materials owing to its various applications. Piezoelectric materials convert the mechanical strain into electrical output using the direct piezoelectric effect. The implementation of piezoelectric effect is produced by wind energy which induces natural excitation in the piezoelectric materials. The materials thus deflect from wind which produces vibration which is in turn converted as electric output. Different techniques are used to harvest wind energy using piezoelectric materials. newlineIn this work, wind energy is harvested by using galloping and fluttering. Experimental investigation of Galloping is carried out by using a cantilever, piezoelectric sensor and blunt body attachment. Performance of the harvester is improved by modeling the best harvester configuration. Nine different sets of rectangular cantilever dimensions (Thickness, width and length) are selected and Modal Analysis is performed on each configuration using ANSYS software. The selected cantilever dimension is found out by using Taguchi s Design of Experiments. Blunt body shapes of square, cylinder, conical, airfoil, trapezoidal are investigated using vibration analysis experiments. Cut-in speeds of the different shapes are studied to produce best deflection. From the experiments, conical and trapezoidal blunt body shapes are selected for further examination as they produced the best results. newline