Collaboration in the topic of energy harvesting takes place on several levels and several European projects were solved. Many national and international cooperations with colleagues from other universities were established and many joined papers were published. Collaborations involving organizing international workshops are also established.
Continuous monitoring of critical aerospace structures is very important. For this reason, energy harvesting and wireless sensor technologies are being developed. Currently, there is a power gap between low-power systems and the available energy through current harvesting approaches. The research team is cooperating with partners on energy harvesting development under COST Action CA18203 – Optimizing Design for Inspection (ODIN). Energy harvesting could be effectively used for structural health monitoring. These techniques are widely described in our article "Energy Harvesting Technologies for Structural Health Monitoring of Airplane Components—A Review": https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/22/6685.
The ubiquitous number of sensors, often wireless today, require power, which is frequently provided by batteries with limited lifespans. Replacing batteries with energy harvested from vibrations is one way to work towards the self-sufficiency of these devices. At our workplace, devices are being researched and developed both for general energy harvesting and for application-specific devices, primarily in the fields of aviation and railway transportation. The main areas of concern within vibration energy harvesting devices are as follows:
Firstly, there is the mechanical design and mechanical properties of the devices. Research in this area involves both the materials used and various types of construction solutions, such as the implementation of movable joints, linear and nonlinear springs, etc. Another key point is the conversion of mechanical energy into electrical energy. Our workplace mainly utilizes two fundamental principles for this: electromagnetic induction and piezoelectric conversion. Lastly, there is the issue of electrical adaptation of the energy harvester's output. The output is always alternating and proportional to the vibrations, so it must be further processed before it can be used to power the devices. Research in this area is also ongoing at our workplace, and various solutions have been presented and published.
Kontakt
Ing. Ondřej Rubeš, Ph.D.