Multifunctional composites for energy harvesting based on piezoelectric microgenerator

This paper developed a piezoelectric energy harvester based on a PVDF-TrFE microgenerator and carbon fibre reinforced polymers (CFRPs) with optimised layup design. The designed harvester targets on self-powering sensor nodes for aerospace and automotive application. As the main concern, the piezoelectric layer of the microgenerator was spin coated. The microgenerators were adhered to the composite panels to experimentally and numerically assessed the optimised layup for energy harvesting. It was observed that harvester with [45/−45]s layup produced the largest power output under sinusoidal excitation.