The analytical modeling and experimental investigation of a nonlinear electromagnetic rotational energy harvester, which can harvest power from rotary and translational excitations, are presented. Some application of energy harvesting such as energy harvesting for tire pressure sensing require an energy harvester which is efficient in generating power from rotational ambient vibrations. The majority of literature on vibration energy harvesting assumes that the ambient excitations are along a single axis. The vibrations from human motion or rotary machines have two components of translational motion as well as a strong rotary motion. The energy harvesting device studied in this paper is a pendulum like device. The base excitations result in rotations of a pendulum. The pendulum is connected to a direct current micro generator. The rotational vibrations of the pendulum generates electricity through the DC generator. Since the energy harvester is responsive to both translational and rotational base excitations, it is called Hybrid Rotary-Translational (HRT) generator.
In this paper a small size HRT harvester is introduced and modeled. The model is used to investigate the relation between the frequency and the amplitude of base vibrations on the vibrations and power generation characteristics of the HRT system. For each frequency and amplitude of vibrations the coexistence of multiple solutions and their basin of attractions are investigated. Three types of ambient excitations are studied: rotational, translational along the direction of gravity, and translational normal to the direction of the gravity.
