The effects of width reduction on the damping of a cantilever beam and its application in increasing the harvesting power of piezoelectric energy harvester

Previous work shows that when a cantilever piezoelectric energy harvester with a given width is split into several pieces and then electrically connected in parallel, the output power increases substantially compared with when it acts in a single piece with a similar total width. It was hypothesized that this increase is due to the reduction in the damping of the width-reduced beam. As a result, the beam with the smaller width vibrates with higher amplitudes and therefore has higher energy harvesting capability. In this paper, this hypothesis is examined by measuring the damping of the cantilever beam as its width is reduced. It is shown that as the width decreases, the damping is reduced, which contributes to the increase in the harvested power. It is then shown that the harvested energy from an array of cantilever piezobeams with a certain total width is higher than that from a single-piece harvester of similar width.