Impact-enhanced multi-beam piezoelectric converter for energy harvesting in autonomous sensors

This work proposes and experimentally validates a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester, which exploits the impact of a central compliant driving beam onto two piezoelectric parallel bimorph beams on flexible steel. At suitable mechanical excitation conditions, the central driving beam impacts the piezo beams and triggers a nonlinear frequency-up conversion mechanism that improves the overall effectiveness, i.e. increases the overall rms output voltage and widens the equivalent bandwidth of the converter, with respect to the linear condition of the noninteracting beams.