Energy harvester for rotating environments using offset pendulum and nonlinear dynamics

Abstract

We present an energy harvester for environments that rotate through the Earth's gravitational field. Example applications include shafts connected to motors, axles, propellers, fans, and wheels or tires. Our approach uses the unique dynamics of an offset pendulum along with a nonlinear bistable restoring spring to improve the operational bandwidth of the system. Depending on the speed of the rotating environment, the system can act as a bistable oscillator, monostable stiffening oscillator, or linear oscillator. We apply our approach to a tire pressure monitoring system mounted on a car rim. Simulation and experimental test results show that the prototype generator is capable of directly powering an RF transmission every 60 s or less over a speed range of 10 to 155 kph.

Hibernus++: A Self-Calibrating and Adaptive System for Transiently-Powered Embedded Devices

“…This technique suffers from the same limitations. The last category of research is related to reliability-aware application mapping on FPGA-based systems [6]. Transient faults are dominating threats for such system as GPPs are incorporated as soft cores in the FPGA fabric and can be easily reconfigured using spare lookup tables on the detection of permanent faults.…”

A methodology for low-speed broadband rotational energy harvesting using piezoelectric transduction and frequency up-conversion

“…Thus the same structure can be used as that of a rotating inertial harvester, although with the restriction that the plane of motion must have a vertical component. Roundy and Tola developed a rotational energy harvester for tire pressure monitoring applications using the gravitational field [19]. An actuator ball was installed inside a curved track on the vehicle rim.…”

“…In terms of energy transduction for rotational energy harvesting, the dominant mechanisms are piezoelectric [19,15], electromagnetic [20,23] and electrostatic [21]. Their pros and cons are extensively investigated in vibration energy harvesting [10,24].…”

“…Compared to the amount of energy collected by harvesters, the rotational energy source can be divided into two categories -unlimited and limited. For unlimited sources, like rotating wheels and machines, the energy provided by the host is tremendous compared with the energy collected by the harvesters, and the rotational motion of the host is not significantly affected by the harvesters, so the main considerations are the amount of energy that can be collected from the source [20], the operating bandwidth [19], and the compactness of the device [15]. For limited sources, such as miniature airflow turbines, the energy stored by the rotating host is modest and the harvesters should exploit the energy to the largest extent.…”

Design and development of a multipurpose piezoelectric energy harvester

“…Their prototype generates approximately 380 lJ energy per revolution under 4903 N load and 60 km/h. Although different strategies for broadband energy harvesting have successfully expanded the PEH bandwidth, in some ultralow-frequency vibration scenarios such as human motion under normal gait ($1 Hz) and wave heave motion (<1 Hz), these strategies are still inefficient or even infeasible [11]. In these scenarios, certain frequency up-conversion mechanism should be implemented to improve the PEH performance.…”