Nonlinear Energy Harvesting

Abstract

Ambient energy harvesting has been in recent years the recurring object of a number of research efforts aimed at providing an autonomous solution to the powering of small-scale electronic mobile devices. Among the different solutions, vibration energy harvesting has played a major role due to the almost universal presence of mechanical vibrations. Here we propose a new method based on the exploitation of the dynamical features of stochastic nonlinear oscillators. Such a method is shown to outperform standard linear oscillators and to overcome some of the most severe limitations of present approaches. We demonstrate the superior performances of this method by applying it to piezoelectric energy harvesting from ambient vibration.

Passive linearization of nonlinear resonances

“…There have been attempts to exploit nonlinearity rather than avoiding it. Bistability and jump phenomena were used to enhance noise squeezing 24 , to enlarge the bandwidth of energy harvesters [25][26][27][28] , to improve mass detection 29 , to reduce the sensitivity of a resonator to the phase of the drive 7 and to develop new mechanical memory devices 30,31 . Superharmonic excitation and internal resonances were employed to improve stability properties of resonators 32 and time keeping devices 13 .…”

MEMS Technologies for Energy Harvesting

“…Taking into account this kind of potential, the equation governing the dynamics of the inverted pendulum with the bistable potential is [18]:…”

Stationary energy probability density of oscillators driven by a random external force

“…Much less attention has been paid to how the color of the noise and the nonlinearities of the potential affect the statistical properties of the particle's energy. This is a important topic, since oscillators have recently been considered for harvesting energy from ambient fluctuations to power small self-contained sensors and actuators [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. The aim of this paper is to begin addressing this gap.…”