Harnessing Ambient Vibrations Through Piezoelectric Materials: Enabling Self-Powered Iot Devices

Abstract

The high rate of Internet of Things (IoT) equipment adoption has led to the need to have green and sustainable sources of power that require no maintenance. The research paper explores the possibility of utilizing piezoelectric material in order to collect ambient vibrations to power self-powered IoT devices. Three materials, such as Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT), Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) and Zinc Oxide (ZnO) were tested in industrial machinery, vehicular load, and human vibrational forces. This has been experimentally found to give PZT the best energy production, which is 15.0 mW in industrial vibrations, PVDF at 5.6 mW with vehicle movement, and ZnO with 2.8 mW with human movement. Technical tools have been applied to detect stimulation vibrations, to calculate optimal devices positioning and foresee their energy output using advanced computational methods like Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) as well as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). PSO maximum power showed a harvested energy improvement 1015% over traditional placements with ANN predictions strongly relying on experimental results with a margin of error under 5%. Comparative analysis with the related studies revealed that the proposed approach will greatly enhance the IoT application energy efficiency and reliability. Such results corroborate the claim that ambient vibration energy harvesting with piezoelectric substances is a scalable, efficient, and self-sustaining energy solution to wearable, industrial and structural internet of things devices.