Abstract
Power harvesters from mechanical vibrations are commonly linear mechanical resonators that are most efficient when excited at resonance. Differently, under wideband vibrations, linear converters are suboptimal. A nonlinear converter is here proposed that implements nonlinearity and bistability by employing one external magnet, in order to improve conversion effectiveness while simplifying device fabrication. The converter is composed of a piezoelectric bimorph on a ferromagnetic cantilever which, under proper coupling with the external magnet, bounces between two stable states when excited by random vibrations. According to theoretical predictions, experimental results demonstrate a remarkable improvement of the rms voltage generated by the converter when bistable behaviour is present.
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