Smart Materials and Structures

This paper presents a detailed investigation on an asymmetric magnetic-coupled bending-torsion piezoelectric energy harvester based on harmonic excitation. There is an eccentricity between the shape center of moving magnets and the axis of the piezoelectric beam, which results in the bending and torsion simultaneously in working condition. The distributed mathematical model is derived from the energy method to describe the dynamic characteristics of the harvester, and the correctness of the model is verified by experiments. To further demonstrate the improvement performance of the proposed energy harvester, the bending-torsion energy harvester (i.e. magnetic-coupled was not configured) is experimented and compared. The theoretical and experimental results indicate that the average power increases about 300% but the resonance frequency decreases approximately 2 Hz comparing to the harvester without magnetic-coupled. According to the characteristic of distributed parameter model, the magnetic force and the size of the piezoelectric beam are investigated respectively. And the lumped-parameter model is introduced to analyze the steady-state characteristic. Accordingly, this paper provides a feasible method to improve performance for piezoelectric energy harvester.