A Bistable Piezoelectric Harvester f or Wideband Mechanical Frequency Excitation

The developments of autonomous systems such as for self health monitoring, embedded systems are increasingly used in industrial applications. The energy supply is a key point for the development of such sy stems. Solutions based on battery have limited life time a nd the power supplies through wires aren’t always appropriate and easy to install. Furthermore, the battery recycling is complex and an expensive process. T he researches on power supply through harv esting systems a re increasing in the same way the autonomous systems. T he paper focus on bistable harvester designed and invented by the laboratory SYMME using APA ® technology and the industrial know how of Cedrat Technologies. Usually, bistable systems are based on magnetic interaction or buckled beams. The proposed solution is a buckled spring - mass (BSM) harvesting solution using amplified piezoelectric actuators (APA ® ). The description of the architecture and the concept are presented in the first part of this document. In the second part, the presentation of labs prototype based on standard APA120S ® is given and described. The second prototype based on APA50 µ XS ® has been designed and modelled. The band - limited noise excitations are used to evaluate th e proposed harvester’s performances. The experimental results are given t h rough a manufactured prototype test campaign. The comparison with the expected behaviour is also shown .