Method for controlling vibration by exploiting piecewise-linear nonlinearity in energy harvesters

Vibration energy is becoming a significant alternative solution for energy generation. Recently, a great deal of research has been conducted on how to harvest energy from vibration sources ranging from ocean waves to human motion to microsystems. In this paper, a theoretical model of a piecewise-linear (PWL) nonlinear vibration harvester that has potential applications in variety of fields is proposed and numerically investigated. This new technique enables automatic frequency tunability in the energy harvester by controlling the gap size in the PWL oscillator so that it is able to adapt to changes in excitations. To optimize the performance of the proposed system, a control method combining the response prediction, signal measurement and gap adjustment mechanism is proposed in this paper. This new energy harvester not only overcomes the limitation of traditional linear energy harvesters that can only provide the maximum power generation efficiency over a narrow frequency range but also improves the performance of current nonlinear energy harvesters that are not as efficient as linear energy harvesters at resonance. The proposed system is demonstrated in several case studies to illustrate its effectiveness for a number of different excitations.