Development of piezoelectric energy harvesting modules for impedance-based wireless structural health monitoring system

This paper reports smart wireless sensor node for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) that is capable of operation with energy harvesting systems using piezoelectric materials. A large amount of research has focused on utilizing the impedance method for structural health monitoring but these studies required expensive and bulky impedance analyzers, which are unsuitable for field deployment. Piezoelectric materials can be used as mechanisms to transfer ambient vibrations into electrical energy that can be stored and used to power other devices. In this study, three types of piezoelectric materials were evaluated experimentally for use as power harvesting devices. In general, the power produced by the vibrations of piezoelectric devices is low, meaning that the equipment powered by the device cannot be operated effectively. Therefore, a time delay circuit and reset IC chip was used to improve the efficiency of the electrical power generated. The experimental results were used to estimate the efficiency of these devices and identified the feasibility of their use in practical applications.