Design And Analysis Of Piezoelectric Configuration For Raindrop Energy Harvester
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Date
2018-11-01
Authors
Izhab, Muhammad Izrin
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
The past decade has been witnessed a huge growth in a renewable energy from
renewable resources such as mechanical vibration, solar, wind and biomass. Based on
literature review, raindrops have a huge potential as a renewable resource for a
piezoelectric raindrop energy harvester (PREH) system. In this study, the PREH
system with a suitable AC-DC power converter is developed. The objectives of this
research are to characterise and compare different configurations of Polyvinylidene
Fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric as well as to analyse different types of AC-DC power converter performance for PREH system. NE 300 syringe pump equipment was used
to produce artificial raindrops and was located at 1.3 𝑚 above the PVDF piezoelectric
generator. Three different configurations of piezoelectric which are single, X-Shaped
and double layer were characterised and compared to determine the best performance
in the term of output power generated. Then, the best configuration of PVDF
piezoelectric was utilised in the AC-DC power converter. Different circuits of AC-DC
power converter which are half-wave rectifier, full-wave rectifier and voltage doubler
were compared to choose the suitable AC-DC power converter for PREH system.
Finally, the output voltage of the AC-DC power converter was utilised in the energy storage circuit. The results revealed that the double layer PVDF piezoelectric generated the highest AC output power (12.11 μW) with the 196.09% improvement from the single PVDF piezoelectric. Whereas, the X-Shaped PVDF piezoelectric and the single PVDF piezoelectric generated 7.72 μW and 4.09 μW respectively. Furthermore, voltage doubler was found to be an effective AC-DC power converter with the highest DC voltage of 1.49 𝑉 followed by the full-wave rectifier, 1.31 𝑉. Finally, this study also found that the PREH from multiple drops at 70 𝑚𝑙/𝑚𝑖𝑛 with 60 𝑚𝑙 volume of water can charge the battery from 990 𝑚𝑉 to 995 𝑚𝑉 within 2:26 minutes.