New insight into piezoelectric energy harvesting with mechanical and electrical nonlinearities

Abstract

This letter investigates the piezoelectric energy harvesting system with mechanical and electrical nonlinearities. Through impedance model, nonlinear interface circuits for energy harvesting purpose can be simplified as an electrical impedance with real and imaginary parts. Their effects on the mechanical structure can be regarded as circuit-induced damping and stiffness. The resulted equivalent mechanical vibratory system allows us to analytically obtain the system responses under different excitation and loading conditions by harmonic balance method. Furthermore, it becomes possible to achieve a comprehensive comparison among different nonlinear interface circuits, including the standard energy harvesting circuit, synchronized electric charge extraction circuit, series synchronized switching on inductor circuit, parallel synchronized switching on inductor circuit and parallel synchronized triple bias-flip circuit. The results from the theoretical model and experiments together reveal that the nonlinearities play a significant role in the energy harvester's hysteresis region size, displacement amplitude, and piezoelectric voltage level. This investigation provides an insight into the design, optimization and implementation for the nonlinear energy harvester.

A Graded Metamaterial for Broadband and High-capability Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting

“…In order to investigate the performance of an energy harvesting system, research efforts have been dedicated into theoretical [34] and numerical methods [31] to determine the harvested power and the bandwidth. When it comes to energy harvesting by metamaterials with advanced interface circuits and multiple piezoelectric patches, the nonlinear behavior of interface circuits [35] renders the numerical simulation difficult due to the intensive computation and memory requirements. For this reason, a simplified model combining mechanical and electrical lumped parameters is developed in this paper.…”

A review of nonlinear piezoelectric energy harvesting interface circuits in discrete components

“…Though high output power is able to be obtained with a purely resistive load, it will drop sharply when the resistance value deviates from the optimal value. Thus, a nonlinear energy harvesting interface circuit composed of nonlinear electrical elements (e.g., diodes, transistors, and nonlinear inductors) is used as a rectifier and voltage regulator [50] . The output current/voltage will not linearly change along with the input excitation, where the superposition theorem is not applicable.…”

Investigations on energy harvesting systems incorporating mechanical and electrical nonlinearities to charge reusable batteries

“…Huguet et al [32] identified the mutual influences between mechanical and electrical nonlinear responses when interfacing the SCE circuit with the bistable energy harvester. Wang et al [33] modeled the monostable harvesters with various nonlinear interface circuits to uncover the suppression of the hysteresis region and enhancement in output power. Yet, there remains a significant need to create understanding on the principles underlying the interactions between nonlinear mechanical and nonlinear electrical responses in vibration energy harvesting systems interfaced with reusable batteries.…”