Nonlinear Energy Harvesting

TLDR

Ambient energy harvesting, especially vibration-based, is a key research focus for powering small mobile devices. The study proposes a method exploiting stochastic nonlinear oscillators to harvest energy. The method applies stochastic nonlinear oscillators to piezoelectric harvesters driven by ambient vibration. It outperforms standard linear oscillators and overcomes major limitations of existing approaches.

Abstract

Ambient energy harvesting has been in recent years the recurring object of a number of research efforts aimed at providing an autonomous solution to the powering of small-scale electronic mobile devices. Among the different solutions, vibration energy harvesting has played a major role due to the almost universal presence of mechanical vibrations. Here we propose a new method based on the exploitation of the dynamical features of stochastic nonlinear oscillators. Such a method is shown to outperform standard linear oscillators and to overcome some of the most severe limitations of present approaches. We demonstrate the superior performances of this method by applying it to piezoelectric energy harvesting from ambient vibration.