Implementation of a piezoelectric energy harvester in railway health monitoring

Jingcheng Li; Shinae Jang; Jiong Tang

doi:10.1117/12.2045224

8 March 2014 Implementation of a piezoelectric energy harvester in railway health monitoring

Jingcheng Li, Shinae Jang, Jiong Tang

Proceedings Volume 9061, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2014; 90612Q (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2045224
Event: SPIE Smart Structures and Materials + Nondestructive Evaluation and Health Monitoring, 2014, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

With development of wireless sensor technology, wireless sensor network has shown a great potential for railway health monitoring. However, how to supply continuous power to the wireless sensor nodes is one of the critical issues in long-term full-scale deployment of the wireless smart sensors. Some energy harvesting methodologies have been available including solar, vibration, wind, etc; among them, vibration-based energy harvester using piezoelectric material showed the potential for converting ambient vibration energy to electric energy in railway health monitoring even for underground subway systems. However, the piezoelectric energy harvester has two major problems including that it could only generate small amount of energy, and that it should match the exact narrow band natural frequency with the excitation frequency. To overcome these problems, a wide band piezoelectric energy harvester, which could generate more power on various frequencies regions, has been designed and validated with experimental test. Then it was applied to a full-scale field test using actual railway train. The power generation of the wide band piezoelectric array has been compared to a narrow-band, resonant-based, piezoelectric energy harvester.

Citation Download Citation

Jingcheng Li, Shinae Jang, and Jiong Tang "Implementation of a piezoelectric energy harvester in railway health monitoring", Proc. SPIE 9061, Sensors and Smart Structures Technologies for Civil, Mechanical, and Aerospace Systems 2014, 90612Q (8 March 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2045224

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