Experimental Study of Droplet-Based Vibrational Energy Harveste

Energy harvesting is the conversion of ambient energy existing in the environment into electrical energy, which is regarded as a clean and environmental friendly technology. The output characteristics and the affecting factors of the droplet-based vibrational energy harvester were investigated in this research. A vibrational energy harvester based on a single droplet was fabricated and measured for its output voltage and output power. The experimental results showed shat the output performance of the droplet-based vibrational energy harvester is better than that of the vibrational energy harvester without a droplet, because the effective contact area between liquid and solid is larger than that between solid and solid. In order to improve the output power, a vibrational energy harvester based on droplet array was fabricated. It was experimentally confirmed that the output power of the energy harvester can be significantly improved by increasing the number of droplets. Besides, the effects of droplet number and load resistance on the output power of the energy harvester were experimentally studied. Finally, error analysis was conducted on the measurement data to verify the reliability of experimental results.