A Novel Design of Motorbike Suspension System for Energy Harvesting

A scissor-mechanism piezoelectric transducer is proposed to harvest the energy from the vibrations of the suspension system of the motorbike while running on the road surface. For system feasibility, the transducer is coupled with the wheel (unsprung mass) to the chassis (sprung mass) of the motorbike and equivalently modeled as a dual-mass spring-damper system to develop the mathematical model for energy harvesting. In the temporal domain, the charge, voltage, and current are calculated, considering the different classes of road roughness. The effects of the various parameters, such as the scissor angle, width, and thickness of the PZT bar, the velocity of the motorbike, and road roughness coefficient on the root mean square (RMS) of the power are studied. The maximum amount of power of 110 W was calculated from the practical design of the harvester of four PZT bars with width and height of 15 mm.