Investigation of energy harvesting from high frequency cutting tool vibrations

Abstract

The continuous reduction in power consumption of wireless sensing electronics has led to immense research interests in vibration energy harvesting techniques for self-powered devices. Currently, most vibration-based energy harvesters are designed as linear resonators that only work efficiently with limited bandwidth near their resonant fre-quencies. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of practical scenarios, ambient vibrations are frequency-varying or totally random with energy distributed over a wide fre-quency range. Hence, increasing the bandwidth of vibra-tion energy harvesters has become one of the most critical issues before these harvesters can be widely deployed in practice.

This paper presents the simulation results of high frequency harvester composed from circular piezoelectric bimorph. A high frequency piezoelectric generator is pro-posed, because that during material cutting excited high frequency vibrations could be useful for the excitation of circular piezoelectric transducer bimorphs. The broadband vibration energy harvesting possibility is achieved by changing circular plate shape and constraints conditions. Self-powered wireless sensor node is elaborated for smart cutting tools applications.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.mech.20.5.7902