Motion energy harvesting and storage system including printed piezoelectric film and supercapacitor

We report the study of piezoelectric transducer based on the copolymer P(VDF:TrFE) for energy harvesting based on deformation of the film. The bending characteristics, sensitivity, charge generation and frequency response at typical machine component frequencies of printed piezoelectric transducer was studied. Interestingly piezoelectric transducer shows response towards a different level of frequency and the bending forces. As expected, increased frequency and deformation yield increased energy harvesting. A harvester system integrated on flexible foil and comprising a printed piezoelectric element, integrated rectifier and printed supercapacitor was demonstrated, which harvests sufficient energy for low power measurements or radio transmission.

I. Introduction

Energy harvesting is a method for obtaining or capturing the possible amounts of energy from our surroundings available in the form of heat, motion, mechanic, solar, pressure gradients etc. A large amount of energy in a macro scale can be obtained from solar, wind, kinetic for domestic as well as industrial purposes. Energy harvesting is also a useful and important means of making low power distributed transducers energetically autonomous and environmentally sustainable. [1] Harb mentioned there are a number of approaches to energy harvesting. One way is energy conversion of mechanical to electrical energy using piezoelectric transducer materials. Such harvested energy can be used for low powered systems such as wireless transducers, biomedical implants, military monitoring services, structure-embedded instrumentation, remote weather station, calculators, watches, Bluetooth headsets etc. [2]