Exploring the nonlinear dynamics of bistable energy harvester

Vinicius Lopes (1) , João Peterson (1) , Americo Cunha Jr (1)

1 UERJ - Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Brasil] = Rio de Janeiro State University [Brazil] = Université d'État de Rio de Janeiro [Brésil]

Recent technology advances and increasing power demands have been encouraging renewable energies research, among which are the energy harvesting technologies (Pfenniger et al., 2014), (Spies, Pollak and Mateu, 2015). Energy harvesting devices are able to support low power applications such as boarded electrical circuits and sensors, medical electrical implants (e.g. pace-markers) and general low-power-consumption electrical equipment far from power supply, for example. Its concept consists of an electromechanical device able to capture environmental energy, available from natural or artificial sources as heat, pressure differences, vibration, etc, and converting it into an electrical potential. As nonlinearities may improve energy harvesting processes gains (Cottone, Vocca and Gammaitoni, 2009), this subject has been the object of study of recent works by Leite et al (2016), Peterson, Lopes and Cunha (2017), Lopes, Peterson and Cunha (2017) and Lopes, Peterson and Cunha (2018). Motivated by necessity of investigate in deep the nonlinear phenomena underlying new energy harvesting systems, this work aims to characterize in detail, by means of bifurcation diagrams and attraction basins, a nonlinear bistable dynamical system associated to the electromechanical oscillator presented in Erturk, Hoffmann and Inman (2009). This characterization is necessary not only to have a better understanding of the basic physics underlying the energy harvesting system, but also to allow the optimization of its performance. The energy harvesting system addressed in this work is the piezo-magneto-elastic beam schematically represented in Figure 1, proposed by Erturk, Hoffmann and Inman (2009). It consists on a cantilever slim ferromagnetic beam, attached to a rigid base driven by a harmonic forcing, which vibrates in a nonlinear regime due to the presence of a pair of magnets at the bottom of the base. On the top of this beam there is a piezoelectric transducer, which produces electrical potential when activated by mechanical pressure, that couples this mechanical structure to a resistive electrical circuit. Ferromagnetic beam Piezoelectric material Rigid base Resistor Magnets N N x Figure 1-Schematic representation of the piezo-magneto-elastic energy harvesting system.

Mots clés: nonlinear dynamics; energy harvesting; basins of attraction; bifurcation diagrams

Domaines: Vibrations [physics.class-ph]; Dynamique Chaotique [nlin.CD]; Mécanique des structures [physics.class-ph]; Mécanique des solides [physics.class-ph]; Génie mécanique [physics.class-ph]

Vinicius Lopes, João Peterson, Americo Cunha Jr. Exploring the nonlinear dynamics of bistable energy harvester. XVIII International Symposium on Dynamic Problems of Mechanics (Diname 2019), Mar 2019, Armação dos Búzios, Brazil. ⟨hal-01974240⟩