Impulsively-Excited Bistable Energy Harvester Combined With Electromagnetic Mechanism

Impulsive energy provides a promising source for energy harvesting techniques due to their high amplitude and abundance in a living environment. The sensitivity to excitation of bistable energy harvesters makes them feasible for impulsive-type events. In this paper, a novel impulsively-excited bistable energy harvester with rotary structure and plectrum is proposed to achieve plucking-based frequency up-conversion. The input excitation is converted to plucking force on the bistable energy harvester, so as to help it go into the high-energy orbit. The piezoelectric and electromagnetic transduction mechanisms are combined by incorporating a coil to the structure in order to overcome the increase of damping introduced by the bistable configuration. As a result, high-energy output and broadband performance could be realized. Impact mechanics is employed to develop a comprehensive model, which could be used to analyze the nonlinear dynamics and predict the system responses under various plucking velocities and overlap lengths. Numerical simulation shows that the bistable energy harvester could experience large-amplitude oscillation under impulsive excitation and the hybrid configuration outperforms the standalone ones under high damping ratio and low coupling coefficient. The proposed design is targeted to be applied on the turnstile gates of the subway station. Less human effort would be needed when passengers pass the turnstile gate due to the snap-through motion of bistability.