Tire tread deformation sensor and energy harvester development for "Smart Tire" applications

Pneumatic tires are critical components in mobile systems that are widely used in our lives for passenger and goods transportation. Wheel/ground interactions in these systems play an extremely important role for not only system design and efficiency but also safe operation. However, fully understanding wheel/ground interactions is challenging because of high complexity of such interactions and the lack of in situ sensors. In this paper, we present the development of a tire tread deformation sensor and energy harvester for real-time tire monitoring and control. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) based micro-sensor is designed and fabricated to embed inside the tire tread and to measure the tread deformation. We also present a cantilever array based energy harvester that takes advantages of the mechanical bandpass filter concept. The harvester design is able to have a natural frequency band that can be used to harvest energy from varying-frequency vibrational sources. The energy harvester is also built using with new single crystal relaxor ferroelectric material (1-x)Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O-3-xPbTiO(3) (PMN-PT) and interdigited (IDT) electrodes that can perform the energy conversion more efficiently. Some preliminary experiment results show that the performance of the sensor and the energy harvester is promising.