Underwater energy harvesting system based on plucked-driven piezoelectrics

The continuous reduction in power consumption of sensing electronics used in underwater applications has led to immense research interests in energy harvesting techniques for self-powered devices. In this paper a new idea is proposed and studied to supply sea bottom low-consumption devices using piezoelectric bimorphs elements. Harvesting this mechanical energy has an important hurdle because of the very low and varying frequency, which generally vary from 0.1Hz to 2Hz. Therefore, this work presents a solution on how to generate power from water kinetics using a prototype based on a Bristol pendulum which can generate electrical energy using piezoelectric bimorphs. The main purpose of this system is to unrelate the rate of impacts to the piezoelectric material from its natural oscillation frequency, making it viable to harvest energy from a slow motion environment such as the sea. Finally a prototype with a proposed electronic harvesting system is built and tested in a real medium, showing the results before concluding the article.