Sistema de Energy Harvesting empregado a estruturas bioinspiradas usando dispositivo Piezoelétrico PVDF

Abstract

Recently a growing trend in the technology industry towards the development of autonomous and low-power electronic devices led to the emergence of a relatively new research concept called Energy Harvesting. It is in the interest of such a segment of study to look for new alternatives to derive sources of ambient energy, preferably unconventional, such as vibration, mechanical, solar, thermal, wind, hydraulic, among others unusual, as it were, in small amounts of electrical energy useful for powering low-power electronic devices and circuits. Thus, the present study presents an alternative approach to microscale renewable energy production by exploiting wind potential through wind-induced and mechanical vibrations imposed on small artificial real tree-shaped structures using the piezoelectric polymer Vinylidene Polyfluoride (PVDF) as vertical and horizontal stem. Thus, three models of artificial leaves were developed and investigated in the conversion of mechanoelectric energy, which were called Triangular Leaf I (FTI) and Artificial Leaf I (FAI), both with vertically oriented piezoelectric material (I); and Triangular L-shaped Sheet (FTL), with the horizontally oriented piezoelectric element (L). The results obtained in the study demonstrated a reasonably good performance in converting mechanical oscillations into electricity, especially in the FAI and FTI models. While for the FTL model, it was observed that the use of the PVDF transducer is not the most appropriate in the proposed horizontal configuration, thus requiring future experiments with slightly more rigid materials, such as piezoelectric ceramics. In addition, the maximum output power recorded in the experiments was 3.96 µW for the FAI model and 2.22 µW for the FTI model with wind speeds of 5.66 m / s, surpassing some results found in the literature