Improving the gravity-rotation-excited vibration energy harvesting in offset configurations

Abstract

The self-powered sensing technology based on gravity-rotation-excited vibration energy harvesting (GRE-VEH) enables information acquisition directly from rotatory machines online. However, the centrifugal effect due to the distance between the mass centroid of the energy harvester and the rotating axis (i.e., offset distance) seriously limits its broad engineering applications. To address this issue, we propose methods of using a tensile force provided by pre-deformed springs to counter the constant centrifugal force around the target rotation speed for improving the performance of the energy harvester affected by offset configurations. The GRE-VEH system with a linear spring is first studied by experiments and simulations, where a distributed-parameter model is developed and experimentally validated. The results well validate the proposed mechanism, where the performance of the harvester prototype significantly increases (by up to 1225%). A parametric study is also performed theoretically. The results indicate that the best performance improvement can be obtained by tuning the parameters related to the tensile length, the stiffness, and the damping of the spring. To enable the proposed mechanism in large centrifugal force cases, a pair of negative springs is introduced to the system for constructing a quasi-zero stiffness (QZS) structure together with the linear spring. The new GRE-VEH system is theoretically studied by an updated model, where the system's main characteristics are revealed. The simulation results well indicate the feasibility of the method using the QZS mechanism. This work paves a new way of solving the offset distance problem for the application of the GRE-VEH and also provides new insight into the application of the QZS mechanism.