Band widening of piezoelectric vibration energy harvesters by utilizing mechanical stoppers and magnets

Abstract

This paper presents a design of a piezoelectric hardening-type nonlinear vibration energy harvester which has widened resonance band while maintaining the same peak performance at the resonance frequency as that of the reference linear harvester. To this end, a pair of mechanical stoppers and a pair of repulsive magnets are introduced in this study. An experimental prototype device is designed by using a stainless steel-based piezoelectric cantilever, and numerical simulations and experiments are conducted to examine the validity of the presented design strategy. It is concluded that using the magnets to shift the resonance peak toward the lower frequency and using stoppers to expanding the resonance band toward the higher frequency can broaden the resonance band effectively maintaining the peak response. The damping due to the contact of the tip mass with the stopper is one of the key parameters which should be as small as possible to enhance the band widening effect.