Electromechanical Model of a Tapered Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

In this paper, we present a complete electromechanical model of a tapered piezoelectric energy harvester based on the semi-analytical vibrational model of the tapered cantilever derived in our previous work (Journal of Sound and Vibration, 2018). The electromechanical dynamic model has been converted to an equivalent electrical circuit model (ECM) of the device that can be readily simulated, along with the power conversion and signal conditioning circuitry, using commercial CAD environments for circuit design and analysis. The results show that the proposed model can accurately predict the performance of the tapered energy harvester as an ECM extracted from the finite element model of the device and can do so ×15 faster for 10 perturbation expansion terms when compared to a reduced-order FEM solution and ×150 faster compared to a regular FEM solution.