Secondary Resonance Energy Harvesting with Quadratic Nonlinearity

Piezoelectric energy harvesters can transform the mechanical strain into electrical energy. The microelectromechanical transformation device is often composed of piezoelectric cantilevers and has been largely experimented. Most resonances have been developed to harvest nonlinear vibratory energy except for combination resonances. This paper is to analyze several secondary resonances of a cantilever-type piezoelectric energy harvester with a tip magnet. The conventional Galerkin method is improved to truncate the continuous model, an integro-partial differential equation with time-dependent boundary conditions. Then, more resonances on higher-order vibration modes can be obtained. The stable steady-state response is formulated approximately but analytically for the first two subharmonic and combination resonances. The instability boundaries are discussed for these secondary resonances from quadratic nonlinearity. A small damping and a large excitation readily result in an unstable response, including the period-doubling and quasiperiodic motions that can be employed to enhance the voltage output around a wider band of working frequency. Runge-Kutta method is employed to numerically compute the time history for stable and unstable motions. The stable steady-state responses from two different methods agree well with each other. The outcome enriches structural dynamic theory on nonlinear vibration.