Volume 7, Issue 1

Thermal Energy harvesting intends to supply portable or wireline electrical appliances connected to a generator with the necessary power on the purpose of making them energy-independent. The implemented power values in this case are small; they range from Microwatt to Watt. This self-feeding process is an attempt to cope with the widespread energy-efficient electronic technologies of nowadays. Additionally, this study aims at recovering renewable micro-energy by means of the piezoelectric material and optimizing its efficiency by using Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs). This study sheds light upon the progress made on storage devices that are necessary to compensate for the intermittencies and the inadequacies that occur in the production and consumption of the generated electrical energy.

Vibration energy harvester (VEH) has proven to be a favorable potential technique to supply continuous energy from ambient vibrations and its performance is greatly influenced by the design of potential structures. A snap-through mechanism is used in an electromagnetic energy harvester to improve its effectiveness. It mainly comprises of three springs that are configured so that the potential energy of the system has two stable equilibrium points. In this work, a harmonically base excited snap-through electromagnetic vibration energy harvester is investigated by analytical and semi-analytical method. The approximate analytical outcomes are qualitatively and quantitatively supported by semi-analytical method using multi-term harmonic balance method (MHBM).The bifurcation diagram of response current shows that snap-through electromagnetic vibration energy harvesters exhibits periodic intrawell, interwell and chaotic motion when the system parameters are varied. The influence of system parameters on the response of snap-through electromagnetic vibration energy harvester are examined. Nonlinearity produced by the snap-through oscillator improves energy harvesting so that the snap-through electromagnetic energy harvester can outperform the linear energy harvester in the similar size under harmonic excitation. A fitness function was formulated and optimization of the selected parameters was done using genetic algorithm. The parametric optimization leads to a considerable improvement in the harvested current from the system.

We propose a scheme based on recursively applying analytical formulae for effective properties to a class of porous ceramics for calculating their energy harvesting figures of merit. We approximate the structure of freeze-cast PZT parallel laminae joined by links (or bridges) by a model that can be broken down into two directions along which the structure resembles a laminate. The effective coefficients obtained in the first step of the recursion are then used as input on the second step which gives the final effective moduli. The comparison of those with calculations via Finite Element Method (FEM) on a non-recursive model shows good agreement. Finally, we calculate the piezoelectric and pyroelectric figures of merit and compare them with experimental results. The proposed scheme is a good alternative since it relies only on known simple analytical formulae and has a very low computational cost with respect to other methods that may be applied to such a geometry.