Multimodal piezoelectric wind energy harvester for aerospace applications

Piezoelectric transduction has been an emerging concept, especially in the aerospace industry for sensor networking and onboard generation of reliable electrical energy. A significant gap has been noticed in the generalized and multimodal analytics of piezoelectric sensors for wind energy harvesting. Therefore, herein, a simplified yet effective transfer-function -based, experimentally validated analytical model of the piezoelectric sensor is presented. MATLAB is utilized to analyze the proposed model for two different categories of piezoelectric sensors (ie, PIC-255, and PZT-5A) under the various conditions of wind speed, piezoelectric configuration, and piezoelectric geometrical features. The developed model has also shown the promising features of flutter energy harvesting, and limit cycle oscillations (LCOs) that play an imperative role in aerospace applications such as energy harvesting from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Results emphasize that under the same parametric, and geometric conditions, the PZT-5A harvester reaches quickly to critical flutter mode as compared to PIC-255. Subsequently, the PZT-5A harvester is capable of generating 7.105 mW during the particular region of the limit cycle oscillations (LCOs). Based on the outcomes of multimodal analytics, the proposed model is best suited to both conventional wind energy harvesting (Up to nominal range) and flutter harvesting (Critical limit), making it suitable for aerospace applications. It is also recommended to utilize the model for piezoelectric vibrational energy scavengers by incorporating the additional parameters of the structure in the developed transfer function of the piezoelectric sensor.