An analytical and numerical investigation on the performance enhancement methods for snap through vibration energy harvester

Abstract

Vibration sources are ubiquitous, and the energy harvested from them can be used to power newlinewireless sensor networks, bio sensors, wearable devices, etc. Harnessing energy from ambient newlinevibration sources, which are both broadband and stochastic, is challenging. Linear vibration newlineenergy harvester (VEH) is effective only over a band of frequencies close to the resonance, below or beyond which its performance deteriorates. Researchers considered performance enhancement methods such as amplification techniques, resonance tuning, frequency-up conversion, and exploiting nonlinear effects to increase the bandwidth of energy harvesting. Among this, exploiting nonlinear techniques gained wide attention due to its effectiveness to harvest energy over a wide frequency bandwidth. The transition from monostable to bistable and then to multistable VEH opened new avenues for vibration energy harvesting. Despite its effectiveness, the bistable nonlinear VEH requires a large excitation amplitude or noise intensity to overcome the potential barrier and initiate large amplitude interwell motion. newlineSnap-through systems are bi-stable systems with geometric nonlinearity. The design of newlinebistable VEH based on snap-through mechanism may present greater potential for energy newlineharvesting purposes, especially because of their simple structure, leading to an easy implementation.All the limitations of the bistable VEH also apply to the snap-through VEH. To cause the mechanism to snap between the two stable wells and to initiate interwell motion, the external excitation amplitude or noise intensity must be sufficiently high. The research in the direction of enhancing the performance of snap-through VEH under low amplitude low-frequency and low-noise intensity random excitation is limited. This thesis addresses the performance enhancement of a conventional snap-through VEH newlineunder low amplitude low-frequency harmonic and low-noise intensity random excitation. In this work, three performance enhancement methods for snap-through VEH are proposed. (i) snap