Integration and Characterisation of Piezoelectric Macro-Fibre Composite on Carbon Fibre Composite for Vibration Energy Harvesting

Carbon fibre composite is a strong and a lightweight structural material with applications in automotive, aerospace, medical and industrial applications. The integration of piezoelectric transducer films onto the composite stack can add vibration energy harvesting capabilities to enable net-zero-power autonomous sensing for an otherwise purely mechanical structure. A PZT macro-fibre composite is co-cured with a carbon/epoxy pre-preg in order to manufacture the multi-functional composite plate. Without noticeably increasing profile, adding weight or compromising mechanical integrity, the resultant mechanical plate can recover power from vibrational excitations. With a volume of 13.5 cm³, a peak average power of 9.25 mW was recorded at 2.66 ms⁻². The normalised power density of 97 µW cm⁻³ m⁻² s⁴ is comparable to some of the state-of-the-art PZT generators reported in the literature.