Inertial amplification as a performance enhancement method for snap-through vibration energy harvester

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in exploiting the bistable behavior of snap-through systems to harvest energy from vibration sources. The efficient operation of any bistable VEH depends on its ability to exhibit large-amplitude interwell motion. Under weak ambient excitation, bistable VEH performs marginally because of the confinement of motion to a single well. Frequency up-conversion, multi-stability, and adaptive techniques are some of the performance enhancement strategies suggested for bistable-VEH. Considering the VEH's space constraints, the above designs are hard to implement in practical cases. This study introduces an inertial amplification mechanism (IAM) as a simple passive strategy to enhance the performance of a snap-through VEH, a concept not explored in previous studies. The addition of IAM increases the effective mass without increasing the physical mass and thereby enhances energy harvesting, especially from weak ambient excitation sources. The dynamics and performance of the enhanced snap-through VEH are investigated analytically and numerically under harmonic and random excitations. The harmonic balance method (HBM) derives the frequency-amplitude relationship, which shows a hardening behavior and an increase in bandwidth. The effective potential method provides a closed-form expression for the joint probability density function (Joint PDF), which is governed by the Fokker-Planck equation. The joint PDF shows a transition from bimodal to unimodal with an increase in the value of the geometrical parameter. The stochastic averaging method is employed to obtain the stationary probability density function, which defines the long-term dynamics of the VEH. The effects of noise intensity, mass ratio, and inertial amplifier angle on the dynamics are investigated. Finally, the performance of the proposed VEH is compared with a conventional snap-through VEH, an equivalent linear VEH, and a multistable VEH under harmonic and random excitation conditions. The findings suggest that the snap-through VEH with the IAM has advantages over the linear and multistable nonlinear VEH in terms of extracting energy from low-intensity harmonic and random excitation sources. This simple augmentation strategy preserves the original system's bistability, eliminating the need for the complex design of a multistable VEH.