Tien Meng-Hsuan, D'Souza Kiran
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, The Ohio State University, 2300 West Case Road, Columbus, OH 43235, USA.
Proc Math Phys Eng Sci. 2020 Jan;476(2233):20190491. doi: 10.1098/rspa.2019.0491. Epub 2020 Jan 8.
Vibration energy is becoming a significant alternative solution for energy generation. Recently, a great deal of research has been conducted on how to harvest energy from vibration sources ranging from ocean waves to human motion to microsystems. In this paper, a theoretical model of a piecewise-linear (PWL) nonlinear vibration harvester that has potential applications in variety of fields is proposed and numerically investigated. This new technique enables automatic frequency tunability in the energy harvester by controlling the gap size in the PWL oscillator so that it is able to adapt to changes in excitations. To optimize the performance of the proposed system, a control method combining the response prediction, signal measurement and gap adjustment mechanism is proposed in this paper. This new energy harvester not only overcomes the limitation of traditional linear energy harvesters that can only provide the maximum power generation efficiency over a narrow frequency range but also improves the performance of current nonlinear energy harvesters that are not as efficient as linear energy harvesters at resonance. The proposed system is demonstrated in several case studies to illustrate its effectiveness for a number of different excitations.
振动能量正成为一种重要的替代能源解决方案。近年来，人们对如何从从海浪到人体运动再到微系统等各种振动源中获取能量进行了大量研究。本文提出并数值研究了一种在各种领域具有潜在应用的分段线性（PWL）非线性振动能量采集器的理论模型。这项新技术通过控制PWL振荡器中的间隙大小，实现了能量采集器的自动频率可调性，从而使其能够适应激励的变化。为了优化所提出系统的性能，本文提出了一种结合响应预测、信号测量和间隙调整机制的控制方法。这种新型能量采集器不仅克服了传统线性能量采集器只能在狭窄频率范围内提供最大功率发电效率的局限性，还提高了当前非线性能量采集器在共振时不如线性能量采集器高效的性能。通过几个案例研究对所提出的系统进行了演示，以说明其对多种不同激励的有效性。
