Piezoceramic materials for energy harvesting on 3D printed unmanned aerial vehicles: A feasibility study

This study aims to investigate the feasibility of vibrational energy harvesting through extracting aircraft vibrational displacements with the aid of piezoceramic materials on the wing section of a self-designed and 3D-printed unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The piezoceramic materials are placed at different locations of the wing section to harvest the possible maximum voltage output. The design of the airfoil is chosen as to replicate the existing military type UAVs today. The experiments were carried out on a UAV prototype with a wing span of 0.54m at 20m/s using two different sized piezoceramic materials. The experiments were conducted in a wind tunnel for simulating the flight conditions in a more realistic manner. To further improve the performance of the energy harvesting system throughout the experiments, some modifications were made where the magnet strips are located at the top and bottom of the wing section. The magnet strips were found to excite further vibrations to produce a larger average voltage output, e.g. 613mV. The real time experiments have shown the potential and efficiency of using such energy harvesting methods in UAVs to provide local energy sources for wireless sensors. However, increasing the flight endurance of the prototype based on this implementation has not been proven to be feasible due to the inconsistency in the vibrations on the wings and the trade-offs of additional weights of the piezoceramics on the prototype.