A broadband energy harvester using leaf springs and stoppers with response stabilization control

Abstract

This paper presents the design, fabrication and experimental verification of a broadband vibration energy harvester having a nonlinear oscillator using leaf springs and stoppers. In the conventional vibration energy harvester having a linear oscillator, there is a trade-off relationship between the magnitude of the resonance peak and the resonance band. Since the resonance band is expanded by using the nonlinear oscillator, the harvester can more efficiently generate electric energy in a wider frequency band. In this study, we designed and fabricated a nonlinear vibration energy harvester with leaf springs and stoppers, and verified the frequency response characteristics and the power generation performance of the proposed harvester by sinusoidal sweep tests with the input acceleration amplitude of 0.2 Grms. The overall resonance bandwidth was approximately 33 Hz, which was over 75 % of the linear natural frequency of 42 Hz. The response stabilization control successfully destabilized the coexisting low-energy solution, and activated only the high-energy response in the resonance band.