Piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting technologies have attracted a lot of attention in recent decades, and the harvesters have been applied successfully in various fields, such as buildings, biomechanical and human motions. One important challenge is that the narrow frequency bandwidth of linear energy harvesting is inadequate to adapt the ambient vibrations, which are often random and broadband. Therefore, researchers have concentrated on developing efficient energy harvesters to realize broadband energy harvesting and improve energy-harvesting efficiency. Particularly, among these approaches, different types of energy harvesters adopting magnetic force have been designed with nonlinear characteristics for effective energy harvesting. This paper aims to review the main piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting technologies with magnetic coupling, and determine the potential benefits of magnetic force on energy-harvesting techniques. They are classified into five categories according to their different structural characteristics: monostable, bistable, multistable, magnetic plucking, and hybrid piezoelectric–electromagnetic energy harvesters. The operating principles and representative designs of each type are provided. Finally, a summary of practical applications is also shown. This review contributes to the widespread understanding of the role of magnetic force on piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting. It also provides a meaningful perspective on designing piezoelectric harvesters for improving energy-harvesting efficiency.

In the past, research of magnetorheological (MR) damper mainly focused on how to improve the damping force, response speed and the performance of its control algorithm. With the increasing application of MR dampers in engineering, the adaptability of MR dampers is required to have a greater dynamic range of damping force to achieve better vibration isolation effect in different frequencies. In order to satisfy this demand, an outer multi-pole MR damper is proposed in this paper, which adopts the design of multiple electromagnetic poles integrated in cylinder to obtain greater control range of damping force. A mathematical model of the damping force is established for the proposed MR damper followed by the general structure design of the MR damper, and optimal design is conducted to determine the main structure parameters. 3D analysis of magnetic circuit is conducted utilizing the finite element method, which is used to calculate the magnetic intensity in different areas of the MR damper. Based on the data of magnetic simulation, the mechanical characteristics of the MR damper are numerically simulated. The proposed MR damper is then manufactured and the damping force characteristics are experimentally investigated and compared with other MR dampers in previous studies. The results reveal that the dynamic range of the proposed MR damper is much larger than conventional MR dampers.

The quasi-zero stiffness(QZS) nonlinear isolators have been paid much attention in recent literatures due to their excellent vibration isolation performance under low frequency excitation compared to traditional linear vibration isolators. However, passive QZS isolators are the most widely studied and they are incapable of dealing with varying conditions such as changing the excitation frequency or load in operating state. To promote the adaptability of QZS isolators, a novel approach to achieve real-time controllable QZS is proposed in this paper. An electromagnetic negative stiffness unit comprised of two electromagnet with MR elastomer is employed to produce negative stiffness, and the stiffness characteristic of the system can be accurately controlled by adjusting the driving current according to the displacement information in real time. Theoretical calculation and finite element analysis is conducted to establish the exact model of electromagnetic force followed by the general design of the system. Then a customized driver is developed for electromagnetic negative stiffness unit, and the dynamic model of the isolator is set up to study the effect of relative parameters on the transmissibility. Finally, a series of experiments are performed to evaluate the real-time controllable QZS characteristic and confirm the vibration isolation effect of the proposed electromagnetic QZS isolator.

The fusion of visual and inertial measurements for motion tracking has become prevalent in the robotic community, due to its complementary sensing characteristics, low cost, and small space requirements. This fusion task is known as the vision-aided inertial navigation system problem. We present a novel hybrid sliding window optimizer to achieve information fusion for a tightly-coupled vision-aided inertial navigation system. It possesses the advantages of both the conditioning-based method and the prior-based method. A novel distributed marginalization method was also designed based on the multi-state constraints method with significant efficiency improvement over the traditional method. The performance of the proposed algorithm was evaluated with the publicly available EuRoC datasets and showed competitive results compared with existing algorithms.