Energy harvesting: vibration powered generators with non-linear compliance

Lead Research Organisation: University of Bristol
Department Name: Aerospace Engineering

Abstract

Generating power from ambient vibrations is one of a number of techniques that have been proposed to provide a renewable power source for electronic circuits. Typical applications include wireless sensors to monitor parameters inside the human body or conditions inside a large civil structure.Because of the applications vibration powered generators have to be small and it can be difficult to produce sufficient power in such a small volume unless the device is careful optimised. Vibration powered generators use a resonant mass/spring arrangement to amplify the small vibrations to a useable level and the proposed research will investigate how this resonant system behaves when the spring element has a non-linear compliance i.e. force is no longer proportional to frequency. This is important since non-linearities can occur because of manufacturing, particularly at small scales, and because of magnetic or electrostatic forces.The proposed research will provide analytical techniques to design vibration powered generators with non-linear spring elements and hence improve their performance, making them applicable in a wider variety of applications.

Publications

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Barton D (2010) Energy Harvesting From Vibrations With a Nonlinear Oscillator in Journal of Vibration and Acoustics

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Barton D (2011) Control-based continuation for investigating nonlinear experiments in Journal of Vibration and Control

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Barton D (2011) Numerical Continuation in a Physical Experiment: Investigation of a Nonlinear Energy Harvester in Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics

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Cammarano A (2011) Modelling and experimental characterization of an energy harvester with bi-stable compliance characteristics in Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part I: Journal of Systems and Control Engineering