Enhanced Vibration Energy Harvesting Using Mechanical Stoppers and Parametric Resonances

The fact of battery limitations led researchers look for alternative solutions in dealing with increasing energy demand of remote devices, such as sensors, monitoring devices, and mobile systems for energy. Vibration energy harvesting techniques with the ability to convert daily unwanted kinetic energy from ambient vibrations into electrical energy have attracted researches and engineers to design, build, and test these devices. Among different techniques, to enhance the performance of vibration energy harvesters, nonlinear techniques are more recent; these techniques are able to widen the frequency bandwidth of the device to capture random and multifrequency signals. This paper studied the effect of combining the nonlinearity of the vibration structure (i.e., a beam) with the one induced by stoppers to merge parametric and primary resonances of the device. This has been possible via designing, fabricating, and testing a vibration energy harvesting device base on the aforementioned idea; the results showed that the frequency bandwidth is increased by 388%.