A High Efficient Piezoelectric Windmill using Magnetic Force for Low Wind Speed in Wireless Sensor Networks

An innovative small-scale piezoelectric energy harvester has been proposed to gather wind energy. A conventional horizontal-axis wind power generation has a low generating efficiency at low wind speed. To overcome this weakness, we designed a piezoelectric windmill optimized at low-speed wind. A piezoelectric device having high energy conversion efficiency is used in a small windmill. The maximum output power of the windmill was about 3.14 mW when wind speed was 1.94 m/s. Finally, the output power and the efficiency of the system were compared with a conventional wind power system. This work will be beneficial for the piezoelectric energy harvesting technology to be applied to the real world such as wireless sensor networks (WSN).