Energy harvesting and dissipation with piezoelectric materials

This paper proposes a comparative analysis to clarify the functions of piezoelectric energy harvesting, dissipation and their effects on structural damping. Energy flow in piezoelectric devices is discussed. Based on the equivalent circuit, the damping effects resulted from energy harvesting in the application of standard energy harvesting and energy dissipation in the application of resistive shunt damping are investigated. Comparison between these two applications is made, in terms of loss factor. Experiments based on the same base-driven piezoelectric cantilever are carried out to verify the theoretical analysis. It is shown that experimental data match the analytical results very well.