A Rainbow Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting System for Intelligent Tire Monitoring Applications

Abstract

Intelligent tires can be used in autonomous vehicles to insure the vehicle safety by monitoring the tire and tire-road conditions using sensors embedded on the tire. These sensors and their wireless communication systems need to be powered by energy sources such as batteries or energy harvesters. The deflection of tires during rotation is an available and reliable source of energy for electric power generation using piezoelectric energy harvesters to feed tire self-powered sensors and their wireless communication systems. The aim of this study is to design, analyze, and optimize a rainbow-shaped piezoelectric energy harvester mounted on the inner layer of a pneumatic tire for providing enough power for microelectronics devices required for monitoring intelligent tires. It is shown that the designed piezoelectric energy harvester can generate sufficient voltage, power, and energy required for a tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) with high data transmission speed or three TPMSs with average data transmission speed. The effect of the vehicle speed on the voltage and electric energy generated by the designed piezoelectric is also studied. The geometry and the circuit load resistance of the piezoelectric energy harvester are optimized in order to increase the energy harvesting efficiency. It is shown that the optimized rainbow piezoelectric energy harvester can reach the highest power generation among all the strain-based energy harvesters that partially cover the inner layer of the tire.