Effect of Road Surface, Vehicle, and Device Characteristics on Energy Harvesting from Bridge–Vehicle Interactions

Abstract

Energy harvesting to power sensors for structural health monitoring (SHM) has received huge attention worldwide. A number of practical aspects affecting energy harvesting and the possibility of health monitoring directly from energy harvesters is investigated here. The key idea is the amount of power received from a damaged and an undamaged structure varying and the signature of such variation can be used for SHM. For this study, a damaged bridge and an undamaged bridge are considered with harvesters located at different positions and the power harvested is accessed numerically to determine how energy harvesting can act as a damage detector and monitor. Bridge–vehicle interaction is exploited to harvest energy. For a damaged bridge, a bilinear breathing crack is considered. Variable surface roughness according to ISO 8606:1995(E) is considered such that the real values can be considered in the simulation. The possibility of a drive‐by type health monitoring using energy harvesting is highlighted and the effects of road surface on such monitoring are identified. The sensitivity of the harvester health monitoring to locations and extents of crack damage are reported. This study investigates the effects of multiple harvesters and the effects of vehicular parameters on the harvested power. Continuous harvesting over a length of the bridge is considered semianalytically. A comparison among the numerical simulations, detailed finite element analysis, and experimental results emphasizes the feasibility of the proposed method.

Experimental Validation of Piezoelectric Energy-Harvesting Device for Built Infrastructure Applications

“…Initial research on such an approach has been shown to be an effective in investigating applications of cantilever based piezoelectric EHDs with seismic sources (Elvin at al. 2006) and a bridge application under operational conditions (Cahill et al 2016b).…”

Data of piezoelectric vibration energy harvesting of a bridge undergoing vibration testing and train passage

“…The data provided here is related to deployment and monitoring of Pershagen Bridge, Sweden using piezoelectric energy harvesters [1] and is related to earlier studies on the concept of vibration energy harvesting based monitoring of built infrastructure [2] , [3] , [4] . A total of six energy harvesting devices with different natural frequencies designed around the natural frequency of the bridge are deployed and the bridge is tested using a shaker with swept sinusoidal loading with different frequency ranges and for different magnitudes of loads.…”

Development of a Vibration Attenuation Track at Low Frequencies for Urban Rail Transit

“…To study the vibration attenuation performance of the VAT at low frequencies, a three‐dimensional coupled dynamic model of a metro vehicle‐VAT‐subgrade system is established, as shown in Figure . This model is developed based on the vehicle‐track coupled dynamics theory (Zhai et al., ) which has been applied as a fundamental method to study train and track interaction issues, covering structural health monitoring (Cahill et al., ), train running behavior (Ling et al., ), defective track‐induced vibrations (Grossoni et al., ; Zhu et al., ), and vibration control of track structures (Zhu et al., ).…”