An Efficient Piezoelectric Windmill Topology for Energy Harvesting From Low-Speed Air Flows

• Published in: IEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982) Vol. 62; no. 6; pp. 3576 - 3583
• Main Authors: Rezaei-Hosseinabadi, Nasrin, Tabesh, Ahmadreza, Dehghani, Rasoul, Aghili, Arash
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-06-2015; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Air flow; Density; Devices; Energy harvesting; Force; High voltages; Magnetomechanical effects; Piezoelectric energy harvesting; Piezoelectricity; Resonant frequency; self-powered devices; small-scale wind energy harvesting; smart monitoring; Topology; Wind energy; Wind power; Wind speed; Wind turbines; wireless sensor nodes; smart monitoring; wireless sensor nodes; wind energy; Piezoelectric energy harvesting; self-powered devices; small-scale wind energy harvesting
• ISSN: 0278-0046; 1557-9948
• DOI: 10.1109/TIE.2014.2370933

This paper presents a topology for micropower piezoelectric wind energy harvesting useful for developing self-powered wireless sensor nodes. The features of the proposed topology, as compared with the existing piezoelectric/electromagnetic topologies, are as follows: 1) delivering power at high voltage levels, particularly at low-speed air flows; 2) starting operation at low cut-in speeds (about 1 m/s); and 3) robust structure for operating at high-speed wind flows practically tested up to 20 m/s. The proposed topology consists of a small fan with embedded permanent magnets (PMs) and a piezoelectric beam with a PM proof mass, which interacts with the PMs in the fan to harvest wind power. This paper also presents an analytical model and a design procedure to determine the number of PMs in the fan and their arrangements to maximize the captured power and minimize the cut-in speed. Using a prototype of the proposed topology, it is shown that the device starts capturing wind power at the wind speeds above 0.9 m/s. It is also shown that the suggested topology is at least 10% more efficient than the existing topologies in using piezoelectric materials and that its total volume power density is higher than those of the other topologies.