Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

Energy harvesting has become a growing need in the past few years and research report has kept on increasing for the last decade. According to the Energy theory, energy will never disappear. With suitable conversion technology, energy can be converted from one form to the other. Energy harvesting is the process by which energy is captured and stored. Energy harvesting from environmental sources like motion, light, thermal gradients and radiation, has been investigated as a clean and economic alternative power source. Among the various environmental energy sources, vibration energy is most favorable due to its wide availability and potentially high-power density. Harvesting energy based on vibration is suitable in technical environment like engines and textile mills. There, useful vibrations in the frequency band from low frequency up to few kHz can be found and it is converted into electric energy by choosing suitable transduction mechanisms. There are three main transduction mechanisms employed to extract energy from vibration are electrostatic, piezoelectric and electromagnetic.