Piezoelectric Cylindrical Design for Harvesting Energy in Multi-Directional Vibration Source

Vibration Energy Harvester (VEH) has attracted a great attention recently both in academia and industry. One of the most challenging issues in VEH is the possibility to harvest vibration energy in multiple directions. In fact, Conventional VEH (CVEH) using cantilever beam's structure may possibly become inefficient for the application under multi-directional vibration sources. To overcome this shortcoming of CVEH, this paper proposes a novel design of piezoelectric cylindrical energy harvester (PCEH) which is using patches of piezoelectric material attached to the surface of a cylindrical structure. The Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis using COMSOL Multiphysics software package showed that PCEH has a great potential for the applicability of VEH in the multi-directional vibrating applications such as wearable devices and biomedical devices. (paper)