Harvesting wind energy with pyroelectric nanogenerator PNG using the vortex generator mechanism

This paper describes an experimental study of wind energy harvesting by pyroelectric nanogenerator PNG composed by PVDF film and vortex generator called turbulator. We have used wind tunnel equipped with DAkkS calibrated flow calculation system for the air flow velocity measurements and has velocity interval from 1 m/s to 25 m/s. The characteristic of the air flow are well controlled and presents an uncertainty budget below 1.4% in the open test section of the wind tunnel. A study of the response of the PNG as a function of air flow velocity was carried out. We have demonstrated the capability of the mechanism “PVDF film + vortex generator” PNG for producing uninterrupted current when subjecting to wind flow and its signal increases with the increase of the wind velocity without saturation. Thus, our PNG based on commercial 9 μm-PVDF film was able to output a current of 0.109 μA/cm2 for 25 m/s of wind velocity. The peak power density was 2.82 μW/cm2, which is comparable to previous developed PNGs. We have presented the output power of our device stored in 1 μF capacitor with demonstration examples of loading charges. These results offer opportunities for self-powered devices on a very large scale of wind energy.