Fabrication and performance analysis of polymer metal hybrid piezoelectric energy harvester from wind flow

Abstract

Energy harvesting technology renders a new path to autonomous, self-powered electronic systems that origi-nally depend on batteries to maintain their normal operations. The term energy harvesting is considered as a technique able to scavenge electric energy from dumped energy or derive limited energy from ambient sources like sun light, wind, water flow or mechanical vibration by using specific materials. The electronic circuitry technology advancement leads to tremendous size reduction and low power consumption of CMOS circuitry, which is considered as key component of wireless sensor nodes. This creates the fact that ubiquitous sensor network technology has developed very quickly. Due to the limited energy storage capacity and lifetime of batteries, long time operation of a number of sensor nodes only relying on batteries is not promising. Furthermore, the frequent replacement of electrochemical batteries is very troublesome and expensive in some cases. In order to solve these problems occurred in wireless sensor network, intensive studies related to self-sustaining energy harvesting focusing on the conversion of mechanical vibration energy into electrical energy using piezoelectric materials are presented since a couple years ago. However, typical piezoelectric energy har-vesting systems deploying the vibration of a host structure located in a vibration rich environment can hinder to the operation of the host system due to the added mass and volume of conventional vibration energy harvesting designs. Consequently, new type that using ambient natural sources like wind, water flow intriguing the vibration of piezoelectric materials without any considerations described above are suggested and several research groups have pursued the study recently. The work presented in this thesis focuses on fabrication and characterization of polymer metal hybrid struc-ture flexible piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) based on piezoelectric P(VDF-TrFE) polymer coated onto...