Evaluation of Analytical and Finite Element Modeling on Piezoelectric Cantilever Bimorph Energy Harvester

Harvesting the electrical energy from their working environment has become a feasible choice of realizing self-powered systems or providing supplementary power sources to the battery. In this paper, a pre-loaded piezoelectric cantilever bimorph (PCB) energy harvester is adopted as the research object, for which a single degree-of-freedom analytical model and finite element modeling have been carried out to study its dynamic responses. The laboratory experiments have also been performed to validate the analytical and the finite element modeling. It shows that finite element modeling has a better agreement with the experimental results than the analytical model, while the latter has a rough accuracy and can be used to obtain quick estimations of the dynamic response of the PCB energy harvester in certain cases.