Design and Experimental Investigation of a Novel Piezoelectric Energy Harvester in Pneumatic System

Herein, a novel piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) with good sealing and insulation performance is proposed, which can be connected with the branch pipe to capture the air pressure impact energy in the pneumatic system. The transient energy harvesting process and effect of parameters on the performance of the PEH are experimentally investigated. The results show that the harvested transient voltage has alternating characteristics. The voltage, peak power, and electric work are improved with the decreasing minimum pressure and increasing maximum pressure. The pressure has an effect on the harvested voltage even under the same pressure difference. When the pressure is raised, the rising time and voltage slightly decrease. Specially, the minimum pressure of the PEH should be close to zero for high harvested peak power. In addition, the peak voltage and electric work increases with the increasing resistance. The peak power increases to the maximum value first and then decreases with the increase in resistance. When the pressure varies from 0 to 0.5 MPa, the maximum peak power can reach up to 140 μW at 1500 KΩ, and the power density is 1.43 mW cm−3. To address the difficulty of supplying power to wireless sensor network nodes in the pneumatic system, a novel piezoelectric energy harvester is proposed to capture the air pressure impact energy. Effect of minimum pressure, maximum pressure, and pressure difference on the performance is investigated by the experiment.