A review of energy harvesting from regenerative shock absorber from 2000 to 2021: advancements, emerging applications, and technical challenges

In the automotive and transportation sectors, technological advancements and innovations aim to reduce fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions of vehicles. In vehicles, a significant portion of fuel energy is wasted in heat, vibrations, and frictional losses. The vibration energy from vehicle suspension systems is always wasted in heat and can be utilized for useful purposes. Many researchers have designed various regenerative shock absorbers (RSA) to transform vibration energy into electrical energy that can charge electric vehicles' batteries and power low-wattage devices. The present work focuses on an in-depth summary of rotary, hydraulic, and linear electromagnetic RSA. Also, the applications of regenerated energy and technical challenges are discussed. In RSA, the maximum energy harvesting, and ride comfort of the vehicle cannot be achieved simultaneously. The weight of RSA may increase due to the integration of some additional components compared with conventional shock absorbers. It is necessary to examine the impact of weight on the vehicle's road handling and ride comfort. The hydraulic RSAs have low energy harvesting efficiency, so they are not suitable for lightweight vehicles despite their higher energy harvestability than rotary and linear RSAs. The bibliometric analysis is conducted using the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer to visualize the contributing authors and countries and specify the research themes. The articles are collected from the Web of Science using keywords related to energy harvesting from 2000 to 2021. Authors from China are more productive than others, with the highest number of publications related to the energy-harvesting from RSAs in 2019.