Research on Flow-Induced Energy Harvesting by Flexible Piezoelectric Plate With Upstream Square Cylinder

The study on energy harvesting by flow-induced motion has attracted a widespread concern. The representative energy harvesters are electromagnetic energy converter and piezoelectric power generator. The traditional electromagnetic energy converter cannot work well in low speed fluid. However, the piezoelectric power generator has a great advantage in that case. This paper implemented wind tunnel test for square cylinder-piezoelectric plate structure, thus to obtain the characteristics of energy output of piezoelectric plate at different wind speeds. The results show that in the case of low speed wind, the velocity has obvious effect on the output voltage of the piezoelectric plate. With the increase of the wind speed, the deformation of the piezoelectric plate and the output voltage increases rapidly. When the wind speed is high, the output voltage of the tail will produce more harmonic, and the harmonic may reduce the quality of output voltage. We need to select the appropriate wind speed to improve the power quality.