Energy harvesting from underwater base excitation of a piezoelectric composite beam

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate energy harvesting from underwater base excitation of a piezoelectric composite beam. Four different geometric configurations are experimentally studied in which the beam is either fully submerged or is partially immersed, with an eighth, a quarter, or a half of its length vibrating underwater. The frequency and the amplitude of base excitation are systematically varied along with the shunting resistance to investigate the principles of piezoelectric energy harvesting from underwater vibrations. Results demonstrate that increasing the wet length produces a consistent reduction of the resonance frequency and the quality factor of underwater vibrations. On the other hand, the harvested power is found to generally decrease as the submersion length is increased. Experimental results are interpreted through a distributed piezohydroelastic model that accounts for added mass and nonlinear hydrodynamic damping effects. A reduced order modal model is further established to parametrically explore the system response across a variety of geometrical and physical parameters.