Power characteristics of a new contactless piezoelectric harvester

This paper reports the preliminary results of a new designed harvester system called as the contactless piezoelectric wind energy harvester (CPWEH). It consists of three piezoelectric layers attached with the non-magnetic bars in different lengths in order to produce maximal power for a wide wind wide speed regime. Preliminary magnetic design has proven that three layers can be excited by the magnetic forces synchronously and this situation prevents to damage the piezoelectric layers since it does not make any physical contact to the layer. According to the results, this new harvester produces electrical power at low wind speeds such as 2.5 m/s. The harvested power can be obtained from the range of 2.5 mW to 17 mW. Therefore the efficiency of the harvester having a single piezoelectric layer has been introduced three times in the proposed design and implementation. © 2015 IEEE.