In this paper, the proposed diamagnetic levitation structure was studied to explore its potential in energy harvesting. It is proved that the floating magnet rotor can be levitated stably under the joint action of two highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) sheets and the lifting magnet. Simulation calculation was carried out to analyze the influence of different coil radius and wire diameter on peak voltage and average power in scheme A or scheme B, so as to obtain appropriate layout and wire diameter for the coils which was built the experimental platform. Subsequently, the center hole, notch radius and thickness of the floating rotor are analyzed by experiment. And the influence of different parameters on rotation speed of the rotor and peak output voltage of coils is obtained. Through experimental results, it is found that the notch radius of the floating rotor has the greatest influence on the rotation speed of the rotor. Based on the experiment, a new-type rotor was designed, with an outer shell to reduce the notch radius. Compared with the original floating rotor, there was 49.73% increase in voltage, 55.70% increase in rotation speed and 124.50% increase in power according to the experimental results. Test was performed with the optimization, the LED array of Zhengzhou University logo, which was composed of 60 LED lights, was lighting up. According to the oscilloscope measurement, the diamagnetic levitation energy harvester has an output voltage up to 1.294 V and average power of 60.67 mW under gas flow rate of 3000 sccm and nozzle exit velocity of 6.173 m/s. Obviously, the new-type rotor proposed in this paper could significantly increase the energy conversion efficiency, and make the future application of airflow energy harvester a step further.
This paper presents an improved solution for the airflow energy harvester based on the push–pull diamagnetic levitation structure. A four-notch rotor is adopted to eliminate the offset of the floating rotor and substantially increase the energy conversion rate. The new rotor is a centrally symmetrical-shaped magnet, which ensures that it is not subjected to cyclically varying unbalanced radial forces, thus avoiding the rotor’s offset. Considering the output voltage and power of several types of rotors, the four-notch rotor was found to be optimal. Furthermore, with the four-notch rotor, the overall average increase in axial magnetic spring stiffness is 9.666% and the average increase in maximum monostable levitation space is 1.67%, but the horizontal recovery force is reduced by 3.97%. The experimental results show that at an airflow rate of 3000 sccm, the peak voltage and rotation speed of the four-notch rotor are 2.709 V and 21,367 rpm, respectively, which are 40.80% and 5.99% higher compared to the three-notch rotor. The experimental results were consistent with the analytical simulation. Based on the improvement, the energy conversion factor of the airflow energy harvester increased to 0.127 mV/rpm, the output power increased to 138.47 mW and the energy conversion rate increased to 58.14%, while the trend of the levitation characteristics also matched the simulation results. In summary, the solution proposed in this paper significantly improves the performance of the airflow energy harvester.
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