Testing of vibrational energy harvesting on flying birds

Abstract

Discrete animal-mounted sensors and tags have a wide range of potential applications for researching wild animals and their environments. The devices could be used to monitor location, metabolic output, or used as environmental monitoring sentinels. These applications are made possible by recent decreases in the size, mass, and power consumption of modern microelectronics. Despite these performance increases, for extended deployments these systems need to generate power in-situ. In this work, we explore a device that was recently deployed to test the concept of piezoelectric energy harvesting on flying birds. We explain the development of the device and introduce test results conducted on flying pigeons (Columba livia). The testing device consisted of a miniature data acquisition system, piezoelectric energy har- vester, and actuator system. The output of the energy harvester was monitored by a microcontroller and recorded throughout the flight. The energy harvester included a wireless receiver, bat- tery and linear servo. By remotely actuating the linear servo, we were able to arrest the energy harvester for portions of the flight. In doing so, we will be able to compare flight accelerations of a bird with a simple proof mass and with a dynamic mass without having to stop the flight of the bird. The comparison of these two cases allows for the assessment of the feasibility of employing vibrational energy harvesting on a flying bird. We present the initial results of this testing with regard to the harvested power and the in-flight acceleration profiles.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Shafer2013,
  year = {2013},
  publisher = {ASME 2013 Conference on Smart Materials},
  author = {Shafer, M. W. and MacCurdy, R. and Garcia, E.},
  title = {Testing of vibrational energy harvesting on flying birds},
  booktitle = {In Proceedings of ASME Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems (SMASIS)},
}