Integrated Piezoelectric energy harvesting and structural health monitoring for transportation infrastructure

This paper, based on lead author's doctoral research at IIT Delhi, presents the feasibility of integrated structural health monitoring (SHM) and energy harvesting using a same thin Piezoelectric patch. The structure is assumed to be operating in two states, idle state and SHM state. During the idle state (when SHM is not being performed), the PZT patches will harvest the energy and store it in an appropriate storage device, such as a battery or a capacitor. In the SHM state, the same stored energy will be utilized for the SHM of the host structure by the same PZT patch, either in the global mode (standard vibration techniques) or the local mode (EMI technique) or both. It is assumed that the total duration of the SHM state will be very small as compared to the idle state.