A Study on Piezoelectric Buoy Energy Harvester Based on Orthogonal Experimental Design

In this paper, a novel piezoelectric buoy energy harvester composed by a buoyant sphere shell and a flexible composite piezoelectric disk is proposed to obtain the energy from ocean waves. The flexible composite piezoelectric disk fixed inside the buoyant sphere shell consists of a proof mass and a two-tier plate, i.e., a PVDF layer and a base layer. The simulation results showed that the output power of the harvester can reach up to 1mW, which is capable to drive the wireless sensors. Moreover, the harvester can generate considerable output power in a wide frequency range of 4Hz-50Hz. In a further analysis, the orthogonal experimental design method is adopted to get the comprehensive design and optimizing rules and meanwhile reduce the needless simulations. Depending on 49 representative simulations, the effects of the structural and material properties of the harvester on its performance were systematically investigated and some valuable rules about designing and optimizing such kind of harvester were obtained.