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A Parametric Resonator With Low Threshold Excitation For Vibration Energy Harvesting, Shahrzad Towfighian, Wei Yang
A Parametric Resonator With Low Threshold Excitation For Vibration Energy Harvesting, Shahrzad Towfighian, Wei Yang
Mechanical Engineering Faculty Scholarship
A parametric resonator for vibration energy harvesting is presented. Despite large responses from parametric resonance, two major drawbacks of parametric resonance harvesters are the high threshold excitation and narrow bandwidth. We addressed these two shortcomings by adding magnetic nonlinearity to the system. The proposed vibration energy harvester consists of two piezoelectric cantilevers beams, each with a magnetic tip. By controlling the distance between the two magnets, the threshold excitation level needed to trigger the parametric resonance decreases. Combining the softening and hardening behavior of the two magnetically coupled beams increases the frequency bandwidth. In addition, the amplitude of the response …
A Tunable Triboelectric Wideband Energy Harvester, Daniel S. Nelson, Alwathiqbellah Ibrahim, Shahrzad Towfighian
A Tunable Triboelectric Wideband Energy Harvester, Daniel S. Nelson, Alwathiqbellah Ibrahim, Shahrzad Towfighian
Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Faculty Scholarship
The ability to efficiently convert mechanical energy into electrical energy has become an important topic of discussion and research in the last decade. Triboelectric generators have recently been popular for vibration energy harvesting, but despite plenty of research on its material aspect, research on combining mechanical characteristics and voltage generation output has been sparse. Many energy harvesters suffer from low operating bandwidths and are usually restricted to operating at a specific frequency. We propose a tunable triboelectric energy harvester that has a large response over a wide frequency bandwidth at low frequencies. The tunability is implemented by axially pre-loading a …