Piezoelectric energy harvesting from broadband random vibrations - Michael Friswell (Smart Materials and Structures, 2009)
Historically, random vibration and energy harvesting were disconnected research fields. Funded by Philip Leverhulme Prize, this paper brings these two fields together. Piezoelectric oscillator excited by broadband random vibration at the base is considered. Classical techniques of random vibrations were used to obtain exact closed-form expression of the mean harvested power. How to maximise the mean power, when the excitation is random is discussed. The paper was among the 2009 highlights in Smart Materials and Structures (IOP). Since its publication, other authors have extended this idea to nonlinear systems and demonstrated by experiments.