Exploiting material softening in hard PZTs for resonant bandwidth enhancement

摘要

Intentionally designed nonlinearities have been employed by several research groups to enhance the frequency bandwidth of vibration energy harvesters. Another type of nonlinear resonance behavior emerges from the piezoelectric constitutive behavior for high excitation levels and is manifested in the form of softening stiffness. This material nonlinearity does not result in the jump phenomenon in soft piezoelectric ceramics, e.g. PZT-5A and PZT-5H, due to their large internal dissipation. This paper explores the potential for wideband energy harvesting using a hard (relatively high quality factor) PZT-8 bimorph by exploiting its material softening. A wide range of base excitation experiments conducted for a set of resistive electrical loads confirms the frequency bandwidth enhancement.