Thesis: Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting from Train Vibration

It's always exciting when an academic shares their work and knowledge with us... especially when it involves energy harvesting research using one of our packaged piezos.  

I recently received Nazenin Gure's thesis that I wanted to share because it's the most thorough I've seen yet related to piezoelectric energy harvesting.  She did a great job of:

• Detailing the theoretical background on piezoelectrics
• Quantifying a real world vibration environment: metro trains
• Evaluating performance of the harvesters in that environment (both theoretically with ANSYS and experimentally)
• Designing the most efficient mechanical and electrical configuration to optimize energy harvesting output

Piezoelectric Theoretical Background

The thesis starts off with an overview on energy harvesting and piezoelectricity.  This effort includes the initial discussion on the piezoelectric effect; but it carries this forward and derives all the necessary equations for designing an efficient piezoelectric energy harvesting system.

Preliminary Evaluation of Train Vibration Data

One of my favorite parts of her thesis is that she used real world data from an actual suburban metro train in Istanbul, Turkey.

Performance Evaluation of Piezo Harvesters

Nazenin takes the train data and first theoretically computes what the expected energy harvesting potential of piezo energy harvesters will be.  She also proposes a novel two degree-of-freedom energy harvesting design to improve performance.

Conclusion

Nazenin did a great job in this thesis to bring new insight to the examination of piezoelectric energy harvesting potential.  Piezo's also excited to see what she comes up with using her novel multi degree-of-freedom energy harvesting structure design!  To download the full copy of her thesis please click the following link.  Also don't hesitate to reach out to her via LinkedIn or ResearchGate; and please feel free to contact us at Piezo with any questions!