Vibration Based Nonlinear Broadband Energy Harvesting
Final Report Abstract
During this project, the Dynamics & Vibrations group gained a lot of experience in the field of nonlinear energy harvesting by exploiting multistable structures. The group succeeded in reaching most of the established goals, concerning the modeling and investigation of different aspects of multistable structures for energy harvesting applications as well as experimental verification of the analytical results. The main focus was the modelling, theoretical study and experimental investigation of two different mechanical structures for broad bandwidth energy harvesting: a Duffing oscillator like structure (such as a bistable prestressed beam) and an plate like structure (e.g. asymmetric composite plate). Within this project, both structures were successfully studied by using analytic tools. These tools allowed deriving analytic bifurcation values and designing criteria. These analytic expressions can be used to design multistable energy harvester, thus providing a powerful tool. This was also verified by various experiments. Both considered structures were compared concerning their application in the field of energy harvesting. It was shown that the structures show significant differences concerning robustness. These results were not expected initially, thus giving interesting results. The differences were verified experimentally on a test rig, which was constructed on the context of this project. The experimental results showed that the analytical methods provide a powerful tool to give an estimate of the systems’ topology in advance. All these results were found under pure harmonic excitation. In order to transfer the findings to real-world application, the effect of combined harmonic and noise excitation was investigated. This study proved that the findings within this project can easily be transferred to a perturbed excitation, which can be assumed for most real world scenarios. An ongoing research can focus on the electromechanical interaction, which might affect the solution’s topology. To prove the importance of the derived design criteria and theoretical study, a development of an application is suggested.
Publications
- (2014) Analytical and numerical investigations on a bistable system for energy harvesting application, 10th International Conference on Multibody Systems, Nonlinear Dynamics, and Control, Buffalo, New York, USA, August 17–20, 2014
Heymanns, M., Hagedorn, P.
(See online at https://dx.doi.org/10.1115/DETC2014-34859) - (2014), Investigations on the Bistable Duffing Equation for Energy Harvesting, ENOC 2014 - Proceedings of 8th European Nonlinear Dynamics Conference, ISBN 978-3-200-03433-4
Heymanns, M., Hagedorn, P.
- (2015), Broadband energy harvesting using multistable structures, Workshop on Dynamics of Nonlinear Materials and Structures in Energy Harvesting, Lublin, Polen, Februar 12-13, 2015
Heymanns, M., Hagedorn, P.
- (2015), Multistable Structures for Broad Bandwidth Vibration-based Energy Harvesters: An Analytical Design Investigation, Forschungsberichte des Instituts für Mechanik der Technischen Universität Darmstadt, 39 . Studienbereich Mechanik, Technische Universität Darmstadt ISBN 978-3-935868-39-6
Heymanns, M.
- (2015), Optimal Impedance Load of a Bistable Energy Harvester, Proc. Appl. Math. Mech., 15: 249–250
Heymanns, M., Hagedorn, P.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1002/pamm.201510115)
