Hybrid Solid-Liquid Piezoelectric-Ferrofluid Vibration Energy Harvester
A hybrid vibration energy harvester that couples ferrofluid sloshing (liquid-state electromagnetic transduction via a pickup coil) with a piezoelectric bimorph beam (solid-state transduction) in a partially-filled tank under a non-uniform magnetic field. A fully-coupled 2-D multiphysics COMSOL simulation (incompressible Navier-Stokes with level-set free surface, ferrohydrodynamic Kelvin body force, surface tension/wetting, and piezoelectric constitutive relations) assesses feasibility: PVDF outperforms PZT-7A, the response is broadband like sloshing, and harvested power is only nanowatts because the bimorph natural frequency lies far above the low excitation frequency.
Corresponding Author: Nadish Anand, Email: nanand@alumni.ncsu.edu Feasibility Study of a Hybrid
This engineering paper is a numerical feasibility study of a hybrid solid-liquid vibration energy harvester (VEH) that combines two transduction mechanisms in one device: a ferrofluid partially filli…