Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting System Applying to Wireless Device of Motor Vehicle

Abstract

With the development of motor vehicle technology, numerous sensors are attached to motor vehicle. For this reason, the amount of energy consumed in motor vehicle is increasing. Therefore, in this paper, we designed cantilever-type piezoelectric energy harvester and seesaw-type piezoelectric energy harvester using vibration energy and rotational energy of motor vehicle to reduce energy consumption in motor vehicle. The harvesters proposed in this paper are applied to hi-pass terminal and Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS), which are one of the motor vehicle sensors. Each harvester optimized the power generation using frequency analysis, tip mass effect, and impedance matching technique. And then, we constructed a charging circuit to check the possibility of harvesters charging lithium-ion batteries. In the cantilever-type harvester, it produced 26.45 μW of power at 50 kΩ, compensating for 28.3 % of the annual consumption of hi-pass terminals. In the case of the seesaw-type harvester, we confirmed that seesaw-type harvester can generate enough power of 228.01 μW, at the average driving speed (42.7 km/h) of the motor vehicle, at 160 kΩ, to drive TPMS with minimum driving power of 10 μW. In addition, we constructed the charging circuit and confirmed that the lithium-ion battery was charged by connecting the seesaw-type harvester.