Study on a Piezoelectric Curve Cantilevered Beam Harvester

A new kind of piezoelectric harvester based on curved beam type was proposed.The curved cantilever increased the surface area of the piezoelectric layer with small space occupation and go without saying to improve the scavenging performance of the harvester.At the same time the curved shape also acclimatized the piezoelectric harvester to the severe dimension restriction in the MEMS/NEMS.Based on the inplane vibration assumption the displacements of the curved beam were firstly defined.The variational theory was implemented to derive the curved harvester control equations.The finite element analysis method was used to solve the dynamic equations.The simulation results showed the open circuit voltage increased with the rise of the harvester curvature radius.The matrix material of the piezoelectric harvester was PDMS with very small elastic constants and density.This curved beam piezoelectric harvester could work at low resonance frequencies even without the concentrated mass at the end of the curved beam.