Vibration Energy Harvesting of Multifunctional Carbon Fibre Composite Laminate Structures

Abstract

A sustainable power supply for a wide range of applications, such as power- ing sensors for structural health monitoring and wireless sensor nodes for data

transmission and communication used in unmanned air vehicles, automobiles,

renewable energy sectors, and smart city technologies, is targeted. This pa- per presents an experimental and numerical study that describes an innovative

technique to harvest energy resulted from environmental vibrations. A piezo- electric energy harvester was integrated onto a carbon fibre reinforced polymer

(CFRP) laminate structure using the co-curing method. The integrated com- posite with the energy harvester was lightweight, flexible and provided robust

and reliable energy outcomes, which can be used to power different low-powered wireless sensing nodes. A normalised power density of 97 μW cm −3 m −2 s 4 was obtained from resonance frequency of 46 Hz sinusoidal waves at amplitude of

0.2 g; while the representative environmental vibration waves in various appli- cations (aerospace, automotive, machine and bridge infrastructure) were ex- perimentally and numerically investigated to find out the energy that can be

harvested by such a multifunctional composite structure. The results showed the energy harvested at different vibration input from various industrial sectors could be sufficient to power an autonomous structural health monitoring system and wireless communications by the designed composite structure.