Simultaneous Energy Harvesting and Bearing Fault Detection Using Piezoelectric Cantilevers

Bearings are critical components in industrial machinery, yet their vulnerability to faults often leads to costly breakdowns. Conventional fault detection methods depend on continuous, high-frequency vibration sensing, digitizing, and wireless transmission to the cloud—an approach that significantly drains the limited energy reserves of battery-powered sensors, accelerating their depletion and increasing maintenance costs. This work proposes a fundamentally different approach: rather than using instantaneous vibration data, we employ piezoelectric energy harvesters (PEHs) tuned to specific frequencies and leverage the cumulative harvested energy over time as the key diagnostic feature. By directly utilizing the energy generated from the machinery’s vibrations, we eliminate the need for frequent analog-to-digital conversions and data transmission, thereby reducing energy consumption at the sensor node and extending its operational lifetime. To validate this approach, we use a numerical PEH model and publicly available acceleration datasets, examining various PEH designs with different natural frequencies. We also consider the influence of the classification algorithm, the number of devices, and the observation window duration. The results demonstrate that the harvested energy reliably indicates bearing faults across a range of conditions and severities. By leveraging the proposed framework instead of high-frequency vibration signals, the system significantly reduces the energy requirements for data acquisition and transmission—by over 70% and 99%, respectively. This makes the methodology a highly promising solution for long-term, self-powered condition monitoring in industrial applications. By converting vibration energy into both a power source and a diagnostic feature, our solution offers a more sustainable, low-maintenance strategy for fault detection in smart machinery.