Dynamic analysis of a novel multilink-spring mechanism for vibration isolation and energy harvesting

Abstract

Due to technical limitation, existed vibration isolation and vibration harvesting (VIEH) devices have poor performance at low frequency. Therefore, this paper proposes a new multi-link-spring mechanism (MLSM), which can be used to solve this problem. The VIEH performance of MLSM under harmonic excitation and Gaussian white noise are analyzed. It was found that the MLSM has well vibration isolation performance under low frequency isolation, and the frequency band can be widened by adjusting parameters to achieve higher energy harvesting power. By comparing with two special cases, the results show that the MLSM is basically the same as the other two oscillators in terms of vibration isolation but has better energy harvesting performance under the multi-stable characteristic. The MLSM is expected to reduce the impact of vibration on high-precision sensitive equipment in some special sites such as subway and mine, and at the same time supply power to structural health monitoring device.