Energy Harvesting from Beam like Structures

Abstract

In this era, energy harvesting from an external source is a new field of research. The main purpose of energy harvesters is to drive low-energy devices without battery support. Considering different environmental concerns of the energy sources, vibration is found to be favorable to generate environmental friendly energy having prospects of technological development. In the environment, a lot of residual energy is presented as wasted energy which can be extracted using different energy harvesters. This can be achieved by implementing the concept of smart materials and other different techniques of energy harvesting. This energy source is exploited from the environment through the application of a moving body. In our day-to-day life, these applications are found in various fields such as civil constructions, aerospace, mechanical shop and in the field of transportation, etc. Keeping eye on the environmental concern, piezoelectric is the newest self-sustained material for the extraction of energy to empower small-scale devices. In all the mentioned cases due to vibration of structures, residual energies discharged into the surroundings as wasted energy can be extracted using various energy harvesters. The present work focuses on the modeling of piezoelectric energy harvester having different structures excited by a moving body. The thesis covers both analytical and finite element analysis of different models as per requirement. Different electromechanically coupled mathematical models of various systems are derived by using Hamilton’s principle, Galerkin’s method, and Newmark’s integration method to obtain the dynamic response of beam under given boundary conditions. To make the solution more practical, the analysis is carried out by considering different nonlinearities like kinematic and geometrical nonlinearity to the system model. A piezoelectric patch is attached to the beam-mass system to extract electrical energy and store it using an electrical circuit. Different mechanical structures are modeled for vibration analysis and energy harvesting. Finally, an optimization technique is implemented to get optimal energy harvesting from the structures.