Abstract
This paper presents the modeling of an Fe–Ga energy harvester prototype, within a large range of values of operating parameters (mechanical preload, amplitude and frequency of dynamic load, electric load resistance). The simulations, based on a hysteretic Preisach-type model, employ a voltage-driven finite element formulation using the fixed-point technique, to handle the material nonlinearities. Due to the magneto–mechanical characteristics of Fe–Ga, a preliminary tuning must be performed for each preload to individualize the fixed point constant, to ensure a good convergence of the method. This paper demonstrates how this approach leads to good results for the Fe–Ga prototype. The relative discrepancies between experimental and computational values of the output power remain lower than 5% in the entire range of operating parameters considered.
Highlights
There has long been interest in giant magnetostrictive materials (GMMs)
This paper presents the modeling of an Fe–Ga energy harvester prototype, within a large range of values of operating parameters
The magnetic bias was provided by two Nd–Fe–B permanentpick-up magnets (PMs) with 955 kA/m coercive field and 1.2 T remanence and kept constant during all measurements
Summary
There has long been interest in giant magnetostrictive materials (GMMs). The first real application of a magnetostrictive material for actuators with marine sonar dates to the late 1970s. In the mid-1980s, Terfenol-D became commercially available and new high-energy-density devices were developed, along with design tools suitable for predicting the dynamic performance of GMMs. In the 1990s, the first attempts to model GMMs, in which the material is considered as nonlinear, were proposed [1,2,3,4,5]. In the 2000s, along with an improvement in the devices, came the development of more accurate general mathematical models of magnetostrictive materials [6,7]. The piezomagnetic equations were presented in early papers, such as [7] Even though these early papers were only focused on models of the magnetostrictive material, new approaches showed the coupling of electromagnetic and magnetoelastic phenomena, together with the development of advanced hysteresis models [8,9,10,11,12]
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