A Graded Metamaterial for Broadband and High-capability Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a broadband graded metamaterial with beam-like resonators and piezoelectric patches, achieving significantly higher energy harvesting efficiency from low-frequency vibrations compared to traditional methods.

Contribution

It presents a novel graded metamaterial design integrated with piezoelectric components and a self-powered circuit, enabling broadband and high-capability energy harvesting at low frequencies.

Findings

Five-fold increase in harvested power over conventional harvesters

Effective spatial frequency separation and slow-wave phenomena observed

Potential for energy-efficient vibration-powered devices demonstrated

Abstract

This work studies a broadband graded metamaterial, which integrates the piezoelectric energy harvesting function targeting low-frequency structural vibrations, lying below 100 Hz. The device combines a graded metamaterial with beam-like resonators, piezoelectric patches and a self-powered piezoelectric interface circuit for energy harvesting. Based on the mechanical and electrical lumped parameters, an integrated model is proposed to investigate the power performance of the proposed design. Thorough numerical simulations were conducted to analyse the spatial frequency separation capacity and the slow-wave phenomenon of the graded metamaterial for broadband and high-capability piezoelectric energy harvesting. Experiments with realistic vibration sources show that the harvested power of the proposed design yields a five-fold increase with respect to conventional harvesting solutions based on single cantilever harvesters. Our results reveal the significant potential on exploitation of graded metamaterials for energy-efficient vibration-powered devices.