Performance of energy scavenging device by considering fatigue of PZT

Abstract

Purpose

Purpose is to design the energy harvesters and to know the limit of the application of load on the PZT material. Fatigue failures of the designed products is merely bothering the modern engineers and scientists for the research communities of all fields. Especially in the field of Micro Electromechanical Systems (MEMS), durability of low power systems is very important under the climates of both at high temperature and low temperature zones. And also continuous electrical power requirement is important for the MEMS and wireless sensor networks. Electricity is the greatest crisis in the world on one side and on the other side, durability of smart devices such as mobile phones, laptops, compact devices, computer spare parts are unrecyclicable batteries for reducing the rate of pollution in the environment.

Design/methodology/approach

By considering these problems, authors have taken up a research in finding the first fatigue characteristics, which are fatigue failure and durability of ferroelectric material as lead zirconate titanate, and then designed the scavenging device by using harmonically excited vibrations for getting optimum power output which is about 15.6 mW.

Findings

Under the resonance operated condition at the frequency of about 50 Hz, a prototype of scavenging device is about 90 V AC peak-to-peak voltage and the durability of scavenging device is 9.715 years.

Originality/value

Durability of PZT at different environmental conditions plays a very important role for the continuous function of low power devices. The output of PZT may change when the working time increases in addition with the mechanical properties.

Citation

Allamraju, K.V. and Korla, S. (2016), "Performance of energy scavenging device by considering fatigue of PZT", World Journal of Engineering, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 124-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/WJE-04-2016-017