Piezoelectric metastructures for simultaneous broadband energy harvesting and vibration suppression of traveling waves

TL;DR

This paper presents a piezoelectric metastructure that simultaneously achieves broadband vibration suppression and high-efficiency energy harvesting by leveraging local resonance and Bragg band gaps, validated through analytical, numerical, and experimental methods.

Contribution

It introduces a fully coupled electroelastic transfer matrix model for a piezoelectric metastructure capable of broadband vibration mitigation and energy harvesting, a novel multifunctional approach.

Findings

Energy harvesting efficiency up to 95% at 3.18 kHz

51% energy harvesting efficiency near 5.8 kHz

Broadband vibration attenuation of 1.8 kHz and 1.1 kHz

Abstract

In this paper, we explore an electromechanical metastructure consisting of a periodic array of piezoelectric bimorphs with resistive-inductive loads for simultaneous harvesting and attenuation of traveling wave energy. We develop fully coupled analytical models, i.e., an electroelastic transfer matrix method, and exploit both locally-resonant and Bragg band gaps to achieve a multifunctional metastructure which is capable for maximum energy conversion and vibration mitigation in a broadband fashion. Our analytical and numerical results show that the proposed metastructure can achieve energy harvesting efficiency up to 95% at the local resonance frequency of 3.18 kHz, while reaching about 51% at 5.8 kHz near the upper limit of the Bragg band gap. The broadband vibration mitigation performance based on 50% power attenuation is predicted as 1.8 kHz and 1.1 kHz in the vicinity of the band gaps. The theoretical frameworks and the applicability of the proposed metastructure are validated using a full-scale experimental setup.