Abstract
The pollution problem of fossil energy sources has caused the development of green energy harvesting systems. Piezoelectric energy harvesting technology has been developed under those external environmental factors. A piezoelectric energy harvester can be defined as a device which transforms mechanical vibration or impact energy into electrical energy. Most researches have focused on bender structures. However, these have a limitation on energy efficiency because of the small effective electromechanical coupling factor, around 10%. Therefore, we should look for a new design for energy harvesting. A cymbal energy harvester can be a good candidate for the high-power energy harvester because it uses a high amplification mechanism using endcaps while keeping a higher electromechanical coupling factor. In this research, we focused on energy efficiency improvements of the cymbal energy harvester by changing the polarization direction, because the electromechanical coupling factor of the k33 mode and the k15 mode is larger than that of the k31 mode. Theoretically, we checked the cymbal harvester with radial polarization and it could obtain 6 times larger energy than that with the k31 direction polarization. Furthermore, we verified the theoretical expectation using the finite element method program. Consequently, we could expect a more efficient cymbal harvester with the radial polarization by comparing two polarization directions.
