Estimation of the power of a MFC type piezoelectric used for electric energy recovery from vibrations

One of the possibilities of piezoelectric transducers applications are systems for electric energy recovering from mechanical vibrations. The obtained amount of electric energy is not big but sometimes it is enough for power supply some elements such us microcontrollers or other electronic devices with low energy consumptions. The main advantage of piezoelectric transducers used as power supply elements is that there is no necessary to replace batteries or use wires. In this paper results of laboratory tests of Macro Fiber Composite piezoelectric transducer that is used for electric energy recovering from mechanical vibrations are presented. The aim of the presented work was to estimate the maximum power of the MFC transducer that can be used as power supply for some electronic device. To do that a series of laboratory tests was done. The MFC transducer was glued on the cantilever beam surface. The beam's vibrations were excited using the second one MFC transducer. The tested MFC transducer was electrically loaded with a voltage divider of various resistances. The generated electric voltage was measured and electric current was calculated to estimate the maximum power of the piezoelectric MFC transducer. (paper)