Impact of designed asymmetries on the effective bandwidth of a backfolded piezoelectric energy harvester

Journal article, 2019

For the successful realization of autonomous wireless sensors, they will have to be able to harvest energy from their surroundings. Vibrational energy harvesting is one possible power source for wireless sensors, since vibrations are abundant in many environments. In order to make vibrational energy harvesters more useful, a broad bandwidth is desirable since many vibrations are stochastic in nature. In this paper we implement asymmetry to a backfolded piezoelectric energy harvester to achieve broader effective bandwidth with maintained power output. The optimized harvester achieves a minimum of 2.75 V in the frequency range 92–162 Hz with peak power output of 1.80 mW. Asymmetry based on different lengths of the conjoined cantilevers is experimentally and numerically shown to have the largest impact on the bandwidth, compared to the impact of modified mass loadings.