Utilising Nonlinear Air Damping as a Soft Mechanical Stopper for MEMS Vibration Energy Harvesting

Utilising Nonlinear Air Damping as a Soft Mechanical Stopper for MEMS Vibration Energy Harvesting

Ultra-broadband electromagnetic MEMS vibration energy harvesting

This paper presents the design, fabrication and characterization of an electromagnetic MEMS energy harvester with ultra-broad operating bandwidth. The beam stretching induced nonlinear spring stiffness enables the resonance to extend from 65 Hz to 340 Hz and 400 Hz at accelerations of 0.5g and 1.0g, respectively. The ultra-wide bandwidth could benefit the harvester device for more efficient vib...

Nonlinear energy harvesting through a multimodal electro-mechanical system

A semi-analytical method is used to illustrate the behavior of a multimodal nonlinear electromechanical system which is under base-excitation. System is considered as piezo-ceramic patches attached to a cantilever beam coupled to a resistive load. The cantilever beam is modeled as a nonlinear Timoshenko beam using Assumed Mode method and equations of motion are derived through Lagrange's equati...

A periodic folded piezoelectric beam for efficient vibration energy harvesting

Periodic piezoelectric beams have been used for broadband vibration energy harvesting in recent years. In this paper, a periodic folded piezoelectric beam (PFPB) is introduced. The PFPB has special features that distinguish it from other periodic piezoelectric beams. The Adomian decomposition method (ADM) is used to calculate the first two band gaps andtwelve natural frequencies of the PF...

Fundamental issues in nonlinear wideband-vibration energy harvesting.

Mechanically nonlinear energy harvesters driven by broadband vibrations modeled as white noise are investigated. We derive an upper bound on output power versus load resistance and show that, subject to mild restrictions that we make precise, the upper-bound performance can be obtained by a linear harvester with appropriate stiffness. Despite this, nonlinear harvesters can have implementation-r...