High-frequency vibration energy harvesting from impulsive excitation utilizing intentional dynamic instability caused by strong nonlinearity

Abstract

The authors investigate a vibration-based energy harvesting system utilizing essential (nonlinearizable) nonlinearities and electromagnetic coupling elements. The system consists of a grounded, weakly damped linear oscillator (primary system) subjected to a single impulsive load. This primary system is coupled to a lightweight, damped oscillating attachment (denoted as nonlinear energy sink, NES) via a neodymium magnet and an inductance coil, and a piano wire, which generates an essential geometric cubic stiffness nonlinearity. Under impulsive input, the transient damped dynamics of this system exhibit transient resonance captures (TRCs) causing intentional large-amplitude and high-frequency instabilities in the response of the NES. These TRCs result in strong energy transfer from the directly excited primary system to the lightweight attachment. The energy is harvested by the electromagnetic elements in the coupling and, in the present case, dissipated in a resistive element in the electrical circuit. The primary goal of this work is to numerically, analytically, and experimentally demonstrate the efficacy of employing this type of intentional high-frequency dynamic instability to achieve enhanced vibration energy harvesting under impulsive excitation.

A Review of MEMS Scale Piezoelectric Energy Harvester

“…The PEH is regarded as an AC voltage in series with a capacitor [77]. Based on Equations (5) and (6), the system model is given in Equations (10) and (11).…”

“…where k ij represents the piezoelectric coupling coefficient, V R the voltage across load resistance, C the capacitance of PEH, R the load resistance, I the moment of inertia of beam, t the thickness of piezoelectric material and y the displacement of input vibrations. When the external excitation frequency is equal to the resonant frequency of PEH, the output power can be analyzed from Equations (10) and (11) as given in Equation 14.…”

“…According to the different principles, mechanical energy harvester can be divided into three categories, i.e., electromagnetic energy harvester, electrostatic energy harvester and piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) [9][10][11][12][13]. Comparing electromagnetic and electrostatic ones, PEH has a higher energy density and is suitable to harvest vibration energy [14].…”

Rolling mass energy harvester for very low frequency of input vibrations

“…Inertial harvesting mechanisms are commonly used in energy harvesters for industrial applications where numerous linear and nonlinear structures have been demonstrated [14], [15]. In the environment of the human body, however, this approach bears considerable additional challenges.…”

Optimal Speed Scaling with a Solar Cell

“…However, many devices (most notably sensors in hazardous environments) contain energy harvesting technologies. Solar cells are probably the most common example, but some sensors also harvest energy from ambient vibrations [8,9] or electromagnetic radiation [10] (e.g., from communication technologies such as television transmitters). To get a rough feeling for the involved scales (see also [10]), note that batteries can store on the order of a joule of energy per cubic millimeter, while solar cells provide several hundred microwatt per square millimeter in bright sunlight, and both vibrations and ambient radiation technologies provide on the order of nanowatt per cubic millimeter.…”