Abstract. The performance of a ring of linearly coupled, monostable nonlinear oscillators is optimized towards its goal of acting as energy harvester-through piezoelectric transduction-of mesoscopic fluctuations, which are modeled as Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noises. For a single oscillator, the maximum output voltage and overall efficiency are attained for a soft piecewise-linear potential (providing a weak attractive constant force) but they are still fairly large for a harmonic potential. When several harmonic springs are linearly and bidirectionally coupled to form a ring, it is found that counter-phase coupling can largely improve the performance while in-phase coupling worsens it. Moreover, it turns out that few (two or three) coupled units perform better than more.

Aiming to optimize piezoelectric energy harvesting from strongly colored fat-tailed fluctuations, we have recently studied the performance of a monostable inertial device under a noise whose statistics depends on a parameter q (bounded for q < 1, Gaussian for q = 1, fat-tailed for q > 1). We have studied the interplay between the potential shape (interpolating between square-well and harmonic-like behaviors) and the noise's statistics and spectrum, and showed that its output power grows as q increases above 1. We now report a real experiment on an electronic analog of the proposed system, which sheds light on its operating principle.

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