Development of Tuned Dual-Mass Electric Power Generator for Energy Harvesting of Bridge Vibration

Abstract

<p>A high quality bridge vibration energy harvester has been proposed in this paper using a tuned dual- mass damper system, named hereafter Tuned Mass Generator (TMG). To harvest and make use of the unused reserve of energy the aforementioned damper system absorbs, a new type of linear electromagnetic transducer has also been applied. The benefits of using dual-mass systems over single-mass systems for power generation have been clarified according to the theory of vibrations. TMG parameters have been determined considering multi-domain parameters, and TMG has been tuned using a newly proposed parameter design method. Experimental results obtained from a trial bridge have verified that for effective energy harvesting, it is essential that TMG has robustness against uncertainties in bridge vibrations, and the proposed TMG has demonstrated this feature.</p>