Designing, Modelling and Testing of Vibration Energy Harvester with Nonlinear Stiffness

conference paper

English

This paper is focused on a design of a piezoelectric vibration energy harvester with an additional nonlinear stiffness. Common piezoelectric energy harvesters consist of a cantilever with piezoceramic layers and a tip mass for tuning up the operation frequency. This system is excited by mechanical vibrations and it provides an autonomous source of electrical energy. A linear stiffness of the cantilever has very narrow resonance frequency bandwidth which makes the piezoelectric cantilever sensitive to tuning up of the resonance frequency. It could be tuned only for one narrow vibration frequency bandwidth. The piezoelectric vibration energy harvester with nonlinear stiffness could provide the resonance frequency bandwidth wider and it allows energy harvesting from the wider bandwidth of excitation vibrations. The additional nonlinear stiffness is implemented by using a set of permanent magnets. A simulation and an experiment were performed and the results show a wider resonance bandwidth. However, it depended on direction of vibration frequency sweeping. The frequency bandwidth is more than three times wider but there is only a half resonance amplitude of oscillations. That means that the maximal harvested power is lower but the average harvested power around resonance frequency was higher which was the goal of this research.

Nonlinear Stiffness, Vibrations, Energy Harvesting, Piezoelectricity, Resonance, Bandwidth, Bifurcation

RUBEŠ, O.; HADAŠ, Z.

30. 5. 2017

SPIE

Barcelona

9781510609938

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

10246

1

0277-786X

Proceedings of SPIE

10246

United States of America

102460W-1

102460W-9

9

http://proceedings.spiedigitallibrary.org/proceeding.aspx?articleid=2630615