Abstract
An investigation is undertaken of an integrated mechanical-electromagnetic coupling system consisting of a rigid vehicle with heave, roll, and pitch motions, four electromagnetic energy harvesters and four tires subject to uneven road excitations in order to improve the passengers’ riding comfort and harvest the lost engine energy due to uneven roads. Following the derived mathematical formulations and the proposed solution approaches, the numerical simulations of this interaction system subject to a continuous sinusoidal road excitation and a single ramp impact are completed. The simulation results are presented as the dynamic response curves in the forms of the frequency spectrum and the time history, which reveals the complex interaction characteristics of the system for vibration reductions and energy harvesting performance. It has addressed the coupling effects on the dynamic characteristics of the integrated system caused by: (1) the natural modes and frequencies of the vehicle; (2) the vehicle rolling and pitching motions; (3) different road excitations on four wheels; (4) the time delay of a road ramp to impact both the front and rear wheels, etc., which cannot be tackled by an often used quarter vehicle model. The guidelines for engineering applications are given. The developed coupling model and the revealed concept provide a means with analysis idea to investigate the details of four energy harvester motions for electromagnetic suspension designs in order to replace the current passive vehicle isolators and to harvest the lost engine energy. Potential further research directions are suggested for readers to consider in the future.
Highlights
Environmental concerns and fuel price increases have accelerated the global trend toward the following two important research directions
One is to seek new green energy resources, such as wind/wave energy harvested by different energy converters [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16], where the fundamental principle includes two main points: (1) to design an energy harvesting device excited by winds or waves to undergo as large mechanical motions as possible; (2) to convert the mechanical energy into a type of storable energy, such as electric or chemical ones, etc
The majority of current publications aim to harvest the energy of vibrations in various transportation modes: airplanes, trains, and vehicles, etc. These vibrations are caused by different operation environments, for example, the vehicle vibrations excited by uneven roads, airplane cabin noises caused by engines
Summary
Environmental concerns and fuel price increases have accelerated the global trend toward the following two important research directions. This paper develops an integrated mechanical–electrical interaction system consisting of a rigid vehicle with three main important degrees of freedom to describe its heave, roll and pitch motions, four electro-magnetic regenerative suspensions, and four tires, each of them modelled by its stiffness and damper, subjected to uneven road excitations to study its complex coupling dynamic mechanisms. This model is able to reveal the effects of uneven road, the damping of the energy harvester, vehicle natural frequencies/modes, and driving speeds, etc. The steady position of the system in the even road is chosen as our reference positon to measure the small vibrations of the vehicle, based on which we can derive the dynamic equations of the system as follows
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