Experimentally validated passive nonlinear capacitor in piezoelectric vibration applications

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Abstract Piezoelectric vibration isolation and energy harvesting applications have been extensively studied in the literature. The studies include linear and nonlinear approaches. Linear methods are simpler but possess inherent limitations. On the other hand, nonlinear ones could perform better over a broader operating frequency range. Nonlinearity can be introduced in the mechanical domain or electrical domain actively or passively. Since electrical components can be on smaller scales compared to mechanical counterparts, inducing nonlinearity on the mechanical system through the electrical domain can be more practical. Moreover, passive structures require no energy supply and controller therefore they are simpler and more reliable than active ones. In this paper, a novel way to attain passive hardening stiffness was suggested by introducing an electrical component in a shunt circuit for passive nonlinear piezoelectric vibration isolation or energy harvesting applications and the induced structural non-linearity is demonstrated experimentally. A passive nonlinear component is suggested to be a hardening capacitor obtained by the P–N junction. An analytic model is derived for parallel connected macro-fiber composite (MFC) piezoelectric material attached bimorph configuration on a cantilever beam and the model is solved numerically. MFC integrated bimorph model, and P–N junction approximate model are presented. The frequency response of the coupled system is obtained by using numerical models and experiments. Both numerical analysis and experiments validated the hardening stiffness effect of the P–N junction. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first study to demonstrate that nonlinear capacitance of P–N junctions can be used to attain nonlinearity in a mechanical system.