A six-DOF vibration energy harvester based on the six-DOF parallel mechanism

摘要

The existing vibration energy harvesters can only harvest the vibration energy with single sensitive axial and narrow band, which lead to the problems of low efficiency and high level requirements for installation. This paper proposes a piezoelectric energy harvester for six-degree-of-freedom (six-DOF) vibration energy harvesting utilizing a six-DOF parallel mechanism with cubic configuration. It consists of a proof mass as the upper platform, six flexible legs with two spherical joints connected by a single-degree-of-freedom (single-DOF) harvester, and a foundation support. Compared to the conventional energy harvester, the proposed six-DOF vibration energy harvester has six sensitive axes and broader bandwidth for the proper designed six adjacent natural frequencies, so higher efficiency of energy harvesting can be expected. To investigate the characteristics of the proposed energy harvester, analytical developments and numerical simulations on its natural frequency and modes of vibration are carried out. These results show that the proposed six-DOF vibration energy harvester can harvest six-DOF vibration energy.