An innovative tri-directional broadband piezoelectric energy harvester

This paper presents a tri-directional piezoelectric energy harvester that is able to harvest vibration energy over a wide bandwidth from three orthogonal directions. The harvester consists of a main beam, an auxiliary beam, and a spring-mass system, with magnets integrated to introduce nonlinear force and couple the three sub-systems. Theoretical analysis and experiments were performed at constant acceleration under frequency sweeps to acquire frequency responses. The experimental results show that the voltage can achieve more than 2 V over more than 5 Hz of bandwidth with 1 M Omega load in the three orthogonal directions. (C) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC.