Prospects of Harvesting Energy from Vibration in Bangladesh.

Energy harvesting is the process of acquiring energy surrounding a system and converting it into usable electrical energy. Researchers have put much effort into energy conversion and recent researchers have discovered that piezoelectric materials are one of the best option in energy conversion from mechanical into electrical or vice versa.Piezoelectric materials have a crystalline structure that provides them with the ability to transform mechanical strain energy into electrical charge and vice versa. This property provides these materials with the ability to absorb mechanical energy from their surroundings, usually ambient vibration, and transform it into electrical energy that can be used to power other devices. In this paper, vibration is presented as a source for conversion and also the availability of it in Bangladesh. A short survey statistics on the number of industries in Bangladesh and the vibration energy level is shown in in this paper. The harvested energy found from vibration is 2.96 V by conducting an experiment in the lab. Due to dual polarity of output voltage, an ac-dc converter is used and finally the energy is saved in battery through a charging circuit for later uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]