Experimental study of a piezoelectric ring energy harvester

Vibration energy harvesting is becoming an important issue in engineering applications. Energy harvesters based on shell and non-shell structures have been proposed. In this paper, laboratory experiments are conducted to validate the theory of a circular ring shell energy harvester. With the experimental natural frequencies and damping ratios testing in the experiments, energy harvesting experiments are conducted. Output voltage across the external resistor in the closed-circuit condition is measured. Comparing experiment results with theoretical ones, the errors between them are under 10% for the output voltage. Laboratory experiments demonstrate that energy harvesting theory based on the ring is practical in practical applications.