Chaotification as a Means of Broadband Energy Harvesting With Piezoelectric Materials

Component miniaturization and reduced power requirements in sensors have enabled growth in the field of low power ambient vibration energy harvesting. This work aims to increase bandwidth and power output beyond current techniques by inducing chaotic nonlinear phenomena and applying a low-power OGY controller to stabilize a chosen periodic orbit. Previously, researchers used a nonlinear piezomagnetoelastic beam in search of a large amplitude broadband voltage response, but chaos was strictly avoided. Including chaos as a desirable property allows small perturbations to alter the behavior of a system dramatically. The nonlinear piezomagnetoeleastic beam element described by a Duffing oscillator is extended to embrace chaotic motion more actively. By driving motion along a chaotic attractor, even a single excitation frequency results in a theoretically infinite number of unstable periodic orbits that can be stabilized through control. The chosen orbit will be accessible from a large range of input excitation frequencies, potentially expanding the bandwidth of operation.