A novel cut-out piezoelectric beam with limiters for broadband energy harvesting

In this paper, we proposed a novel cut-out piezoelectric beam with two pairs of motion limiter for broadband operation. By means of the finite element simulation, a superior geometric structure of the corresponding linear model is designed and the model parameters are determined, then the simulation results are verified by experiments. The subsequent experiments mainly investigate the effect of the position of the limiter on the beam and the size of the limiting gap on the amplitude–frequency response of the system. The experimental results show that the frequency bandwidth of the first resonance peak can be significantly expanded from 2.45Hz to 6.28Hz by selecting suitable limiter parameters, which can increase of 256.33% compared with no limiter. Meanwhile, limiters also cause a maximum 171.79% increase in the primary resonance voltage amplitude, and the level of anti-resonance valley can be increased up to 5.35 times. Finally, the influence of external resistance load on the output power of the system is discussed through detailed parametric study, and the maximum power output of 370$\mu$W is achieved.