ROBUSTNESS OF NONLINEAR ELECTROMAGNETIC VIBRATION ENERGY HARVESTER SUBJECTED TO RANDOM EXCITATION

摘要

Vibration Energy Harvesters (VEHs) are devices used to collect mechanical energy from the surrounding environment to supply low power electronic systems such as Wireless Sensor Nodes. In this paper, we introduce an electromagnetic VEH model and a semi-analytical method called Moment Equation Copula Closure (MECC) that is compared to Monte Carlo simulations. Those methods are then used to derive the maximum power that can be extracted from random vibration before analyzing the effect of cubic stiffness nonlinearity on the VEH robustness against the variation of the excitation spectrum. Unlike bistable nonlinearity, it is shown that Duffing nonlinearity can be used to enhance the VEH power density and robustness with a limited effect on the harvested power.