Cascaded essential nonlinearities for enhanced vibration suppression and energy harvesting

Abstract

The concept of simultaneous energy harvesting and vibration suppression has made tremendous progress in the past few years. However, the energy harvesting and vibration reduction seem to be independent, or even paradox in some scenarios; for example, energy harvesting strategy expects the primary system to maintain large-amplitude vibration as long as possible. In comparison, the vibration suppression strategy aims to suppress the vibration of primary system as soon as possible. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how to properly design an integrated system, which first ensures the broadband vibration suppression performance, while at the same time, harvests additional energy as much as possible. To achieve this goal, a cascaded essentially nonlinear system is presented for high-sensitive vibration and harvesting energy. The presented device comprises a nonlinear energy sink and a nonlinear energy harvester with cascaded essential nonlinearities. Numerical results show that the presented device is able to simultaneously suppress vibration and harvest vibration energy over a wide frequency range. Moreover, unlike previous research, it is effective for extremely small initial impulses. This work explores possibilities for reducing and harvesting extremely low ambient vibration.