Piezoelectric energy harvesting computer controlled test bench

In this paper a newcomputer controlled (C.C.) laboratory test bench is presented. The patented test bench is made up of a C.C. road traffic simulator, C.C. electronic hardware involved in automatingmeasurements, and test bench controlsoftware interface programmed in LabVIEW ™. Our research is focused on characterizing electronic energy harvesting piezoelectric-based elements in road traffic environments to extract (or “harvest”) maximum power. In mechanical to electrical energy conversion, mechanical impacts or vibrational behavior are commonly used, and several major problems need to be solved to perform optimal harvesting systems including, but no limited to, primary energy source modeling, energy conversion, and energy storage. It is described a novel C.C. test bench that obtains, in an accurate and automatized process, a generalized linear equivalent el ectrical model ofpiezoelectric elements andpiezoelectric based energy store harvesting circuits in order to scale energy generation with multipledevices integrated in differenttopologies.
Source: Review of Scientific Instruments - Category: Physics Authors: Source Type: research