Bio-inspired Bistable Piezoelectric Energy Harvester for Powering Animal Telemetry Tags: Concept Design and Preliminary Experimental Validation

This paper presents the concept design, preliminary experimental validation, and performance evaluation of a novel bio-inspired bi-stable piezoelectric energy harvester for self-powered fish telemetry tags. The self-powered fish tag is designed to externally deploy on fish (dorsal fin) to track and monitor fish habitats, population, and underwater environment, meanwhile, harvests energy from fish motion and surrounding fluid flow for a sustainable power supply. Inspired by the rapid shape transition of the Venus flytrap, a bi-stable piezoelectric energy harvester is developed to generate electricity from broadband excitation of fish maneuvering and fluid. A bluff body is integrated to the free end of the bistable piezoelectric energy harvester to enhance the structure-fluid interaction for the large-amplitude snap-through vibrations and higher voltage output. Controlled laboratory experiments are conducted in a water tank on the bio-inspired bi-stable piezoelectric energy harvester using a servo motor system to simulate fish swing motion at various conditions to evaluate the power generation performance. The preliminary underwater experimental results demonstrated that the proposed bio-inspired bi-stable piezoelectric effectively converters fish swing motions into electricity. The average power output of 1.5 mW was achieved at the swing angle of 30 degrees and frequency of 1.6 Hz.