Investigation of Classical Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Method with Supercapacitor

The rapid advancements in piezoelectric energy harvesting (PEH) have gained significant global scientific interest and stimulated intense innovation. This paper explores a cost-effective, general-purpose PEH system. A common gas lighter, repurposed as a piezoelectric spark generator (PSG), generates approximately 1kV with each stroke, producing air breakdown within less than 1 cm in open-circuit conditions. The circuit consists of four Schottky diodes and a 2.5V, 10F supercapacitor. The experiment demonstrates the setup's effectiveness by successfully powering a small red LED, which consumes around 8–10 mA, for approximately 400 ms without a rectifying circuit. However, when equipped with a Schottky rectifying circuit, the supercapacitor charged at a rate of 10 mV per stroke from each piezoelectric generator used in the experiment.