Power control optimization of a new contactless piezoelectric harvester

In this study, we propose an optimization scheme for the control of a piezoelectric wind energy harvester. The harvester is constructed by a blade in front and a magnet in the rear in order to sustain a magnetic repulsion by another magnet located on the stable harvester body in a contactless manner. For such a new harvester, the control scheme is missing in the literature in the sense that the harvester is new and an overall optimization study is required for such a device. In that context, the optimization has been realized by using a new current control law based on the harvester piezoelectric terminal voltage and the layer bending. The proposed control law can impose a second order linear dynamics although the magnetic effects can yield to nonlinear magnetic force relation. In order to improve the new control strategy, a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO) has been applied, since there is a nonlinear dependency among the control parameters, the collected energy and the bending force mean values. According to results, the captured electrical power has a high increasing trend with respect to the only-voltage-based (OVB) control as the current study proves. On the contrary, the artifact of the method is that the obtained power is too low to increase the mean bending forces and it requires much complicated control system.