Green Energy Harvesting Using Piezoelectric Materials from Bridge Vibrations

Sumit Balguvhar, Suresh Bhalla

Department of Civil Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
New Delhi, India
e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract—Piezoelectric energy harvesting from bridge complex Young’s modulus of elasticity of the PZT patch at
vibrations has attracted many researchers not because it
provides a clean and autonomous solution to power portable
constant electric field and H 33 T
H 33
T
1  jG  the complex
electronic devices, in addition, it helps in making a smart city. electric permittivity (in direction ‘3’) of the PZT material at
This paper focuses on energy harvesting from low-frequency constant stress; with j  1 , K and G respectively
bridge vibrations which includes vibrations measurements denoting the mechanical loss and the dielectric loss factors of
from a city flyover and laboratory experiment using traditional the PZT material. Piezoelectric effect exists in two domains;
rectifier circuit at low frequency and small amplitude
namely, direct piezoelectric effect and converse piezoelectric
vibrations for storage. The typical practical issues have been
addressed associated with PEH from bridge vibrations and
effect. The ability to convert mechanical energy to electrical
electrical circuitry. energy is describes as direct piezoelectric effect while the
converse effect describes the conversion of electrical energy
Keywords-energy harvesting; piezoelectric; bridge vibrations; into mechanical one. The direct effect is used in energy
rectifier circuit harvesting purpose. Piezoelectric materials are generally
used in two modes i.e. d31 and d33. In the d31 mode, the stress
is applied along the length direction to produce voltage along
I. INTRODUCTION
the thickness direction. In the d33 mode, on the contrary, both
Energy harvesting (EH) using piezoelectric element is the stress and the voltage act in the same direction, that is the
one of the best technologies to generate electrical energy thickness direction.
from natural energy sources such as bridge vibrations which While PEH provide a promising way to generate power,
are of low frequency and small amplitude [1]. A there are several impediments which hinder their deployment
piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) can work as a on civil infrastructure. Kaur and Bhalla [4] investigated the
sustainable and green power source for low power feasibility of combined SHM and EH for civil-structures.
consuming devices, such as wireless sensors which can be They proposed to utilize the harvested energy for the SHM
used almost anywhere such as transportation infrastructure, purposes, thereby rendering the system autonomous. Their
building automation systems, implanted medical devices and theoretical cum experimental research clearly provided the
structural health monitoring (SHM), thereby replacing feasibility of combined SHM and energy harvesting from the
batteries, which not only suffer from a finite lifespan but also same PZT patch in the form of concrete vibration sensor
pose environmental risks arising from the disposal. However, (CVS) for reinforced concrete (RC) structures. Typically, it
the application of PEH on civil infrastructures has not been is possible to generate power in micro-watt range. Elvin et al.
fully mature. The power output of typical energy harvesting [5] studied practical issues related to PEH from civil-
devices could be limited to few hundreds of micro-watts only structures. A PEH in cantilever configuration with resonant
[2]. frequency in the range of 100–300 Hz was deployed whereas
Piezoelectric energy harvesting is most attracted owing to
the civil structures typically exhibit a fundamental frequency
simplest structure, no moving parts, negligible maintenance,
less than 5 Hz. Due to the mismatch of frequency, very low
large power density and no requirement of additional voltage
power was extractable. To improve the efficiency and power
source [3]. For a piezoelectric plate of thickness h, the
generation several researchers [6] have focused on the size
voltage generated across the terminals of the PZT patch can
be expressed in terms of the strain S1 as and operating frequency reduction of piezoelectric
transducers through various piezoelectric configurations
§ d 31 Y E h · rather than through circuitry and storage medium. Another
V ¨ ¸ (1) impediment is the random nature of excitation signals
¨ H T33 ¸ S 1 typically encountered in the civil-structures. Additionally,
© ¹ there is the mismatch between the natural frequencies of
where d31 is the piezoelectric strain coefficient providing harvesters and civil infrastructures. The most common
coupling between the mechanical strain (along axis ‘1’) and piezoelectric energy harvesting configuration is the
cantilever harvester. Optimal performance of the energy
electric field E3 (along axis 3), Y E Y E 1  jK  is the
harvesting system obtained when the frequency of ambient

978-1-5386-5236-7/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 134

vibration closely matches the resonant frequency of the for AC-DC conversion which is essential for storage and to
harvester. Under this condition, maximum vibration energy power some electronic devices.
transferred to the harvester and converted to useful electrical
energy. Deviations from resonance typically cause II. EXPERIMENTAL VOLTAGE MEASUREMENTS FROM A
significant decreases in performance therefore, tuning the CITY FLYOVER
system is required. Since most of the ambient vibrations such In order to get first-hand information of the frequency
as bridge vibrations are broadband, piezoelectric-based and amplitude of possible voltage generation from typical
harvester structures can be either linear or nonlinear. One city flyovers, an ICP accelerometer (PCB 352C34) was
possible way to implement a transducer that remains efficient attached to a flyover in front of IIT Delhi at the mid-point.
over broadband would be to use an array of piezoelectric The flyover, shown in elevation in Fig. 2 is a steel structure
cantilevers with varying resonant frequencies. Xue et al. [7] with a span of 28.67 m and a girder depth of 2 m. The
connected ten piezoelectric bimorphs (a layer of elastic vibration measurement was done under a normal traffic
material sandwiched between two piezoelectric layers with condition in daylight for continuous two hours. After
opposite polarization) in series with different thicknesses of analysis the typical acceleration data, the measurement
the piezoelectric layers. They managed to increase the shows that the natural frequency of the structure was 5 Hz. If
overall output power and also to increase greatly the a PZT patch of 10×10×0.3 mm size were employed instead
frequency bandwidth of the harvester. However, this result in of accelerometers, computations show [13] that it would
a large overall size of the system and at any given frequency, generate a peak voltage of 0.736 V.
only one cantilever operates efficiently. This compromises
the power density of the system. Another method to widen
the frequency bandwidth of a piezoelectric harvester is the
use of nonlinear structures such as bi-stable system, which
are able to produce larger oscillations over a wider frequency
range as compared to linear systems. The bi-stable system, as
described in [8, 9] consists in the very fast displacement of
the seismic mass from one stable position to the other. The
increase of velocity implies an increase of the harvested
power, but not a wider operating frequency bandwidth.

Figure 2. General view of bridge.

Figure 1. A typical piezoeleltric energy harvester.

A typical PEH is shown in Fig. 1. The performance of

PEH roughly depend on three important factors:
piezoelectric materials, input source such as human body,
structural vibrations, wind and the power conditioning
circuits such as AC-DC rectifiers [10]. In this study later two
factors have focused. A power electronic circuit plays a vital
role for efficient extraction and transmission of power from
the transducer to an appropriate device in piezoelectric
energy harvesting systems. Power conditioning circuits have
been widely studied for typical high frequency and voltage
Figure 3. Experimental setup.
scenarios (>10 V); however limited research has been done
for low-voltage (< 2 V) piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH).
The output of the PEH is not in a form that can be directly
used to run the electronic devices, it needs to be regulated
and condition by interface circuitry. Ottman et al. [11, 12]
made the first attempt to develop a circuit using adaptive
control technique that would maximize the power output
from a piezoelectric transducer; however, several electronic
components involved in the circuit also consumed power.
This paper focuses on energy harvesting from low-frequency
bridge vibrations utilizing standard electronic rectifier circuit
Figure 4. Bridge rectifier.

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 where, C is the capacitance value ( 1µF), Vss is the steady
state voltage across the capacitor and Tc is the charging time
when the voltage reaches to its maximum value. Using above
equations, the harvestable power was estimated as 0.2 µW. A
detailed parametric study was performed experimentally to
investigate the effect of frequency, voltage and capacitor
types [16]. However, it was very problematic to store energy
when the voltage output across the PZT patch was reduced
below 4 V. Hence, in real-life scenarios, where the peak
Figure 5. Open circuit voltage (Voc) from PZT patch. voltage of less than 1 V is expected, storage will be the
major issue to be looked upon by researchers.
III. LABORATORY EXPERIMENT
After real life bridge measurement, a further experiment
was performed in the laboratory environment in order to
estimate the power that can be harvested under different set
of conditions. For this purpose, a cantilever based PEH was
designed using an aluminium beam with dimensions
200×40×0.3 mm, as shown in Fig. 3. A PZT patch of grade
PIC 151 manufactured by PI Ceramic was bonded to the
cantilever with epoxy adhesive. A horizontal type shake
table (operable in 1 Hz to 25 Hz frequency) was used to
apply controlled vibration excitations to the harvester. The
bridge rectifier circuit using general purpose silicon diodes-
IN4007 (Fig. ) was connected to the PZT patch and 1µF Figure 6. Charging of capacitor at 4 Hz at 4V.
electrolytic capacitor was allowed to charge to its full
potential. The schematic of bridge rectifier is shown in Fig. 4
is the most common circuit reported in the energy harvesting
literature [13, 14]. The four diodes labelled D1 to D2 are
arranged in “series pairs” with only two diodes conducting
current during each half cycle, when the applied input
voltage (Vs) is greater than the diode threshold voltage (Vd).
During the positive half cycle of the supply, diodes D1 and
D4 conduct in series while diodes D2 and D3 are reverse
biased and the current flows (I) through the load.. During the
negative half cycle of the supply, diodes D3 and D2 conduct
in series, but diodes D1 and D4 switch “OFF” as they are now
reversed biased. The smoothing capacitor (C) converts the
full-wave rippled output of the rectifier into a smooth DC
output voltage (VDC). Utilizing a bridge rectifier is
advantageous for applications in which the vibration is
sinusoidal because it creates entirely passive circuit systems.
Passive circuits are those which contribute no energy and
comprised of resistors, capacitors, inductors and diodes.
When the PEH was excited at 4 Hz, the open circuit voltage
4 V peak was generated, as shown in Fig. 5. Fig. 6 shows the
steady state voltage across the capacitor (Vss) versus charging
time (Tc) curve.
It can be observed from the Fig. 6 that when the Figure 7. Installation equipment.
cantilever was excited at 4 Hz, 1.2 V was achieved in 3.584 s.
The maximum harvestable power (P) can be determined Most researchers believe that the key challenge for the
using following set of equations [15] successful deployment of energy harvesting technology is
the extraction of higher power. However, at the same time,
literature also reveals that the power requirements of
Ec numerous modern electronic devices are in micro to milli-
P (2)
Tc watts. For such devices, the main aspect is storage, which
remains problematic in civil-structures owing to their low
1 frequencies coupled by low voltage outputs. Another critical
Eh C V 2ss u 3600 (3)
2T c part of the PEH that needs attention is the energy processing

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