Storing Piezo Crystal Generated 4-5V in Capacitors for Charging Devices

Hi all,
I am Rahul pursuing B-tech in Electronics and communication from INDIA
I am struck in the middle of nowhere while working on my project on PIEZO CRYSTALS
basically I want to store the charge in capacitors but unable to do that
Help me/suggest me ways to do that so that I can store a pretty good amount of charge in them and later can charge my device or cellphone
I am able to generate 4-5V but can save it .
any trick to save them ?
or converting 4-5V to 20-30V ?
thanks for your help
RAHUL
rahul.sthakur(_at_)hotmail.com

Hi,

Theoretically, this would be possible; Gaining power from the piezo material and using it to supply or charge another device. I would suggest you start by using it to charge a rechargeable battery. The current that you will get from the crystal is quite low and troublesome. I have read some people also tried this for their project but it was also a failure. Maybe you can solve this.

You can also check this out: http://www.engineerlive.com/content/power-and-potential-piezoelectric-energy-harvesting

Cheers,
Kevin

The simplest kind of capacitor has two parallel conductive plates separated by a good insulating material called the dielectric. Due to this insulating layer, DC current can not flow through the capacitor as it blocks it allowing instead a voltage to be present across the plates in the form of an electrical charge. These conductive plates can be either circular, rectangular or cylindrical in shape with the dielectric insulating layer being air, waxed paper, plastic or some form of a liquid gel as used in electrolytic capacitors.

There are two types of electrical charge, positive charge in the form of Protons and negative charge in the form of Electrons. When a voltage is placed across a capacitor the positive (+ve) charge quickly accumulates on one plate while a corresponding negative (-ve) charge accumulates on the other plate and for every particle of +ve charge that arrives at one plate a charge of the same sign will depart from the -ve plate. Then the plates remain charge neutral as a potential difference due to this charge is established between the two plates. The amount of potential difference present across the capacitor depends upon how much charge was deposited onto the plates by the work being done by the source voltage and also by how much capacitance the capacitor has. That's all I know about capacitors. If you need any help see the link: http://www.bkelectricservices.com/

I assume that you have looked at some of the technical papers available on the WWW.
For example:
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/23598...ting_electricity_using_piezoelectric_material.
There are a lot of references as a starting point.
The power available from piezo devices is low, an interesting project might be to find materials and methods for using them that will increase the power available,
Cheers,
Richard