Smart Nonlinear Energy Harvesting

Abstract

The possibility to take advantage of external and not deterministic vibrations is of great interest in the modern research including sensing elements and transducers. In particular piezoelectric transducers arouse interest in the international community with particular emphasis in the area of measurements and metrology; in fact the literature presents several examples of transducers based on piezoelectric materials but, very often, focusing the attention on a specific prototype able to save energy by using the active material (transducer for energy harvesting) or suitable to perform measurements (sensor) and to transmit the data by using an active circuit. Authors already addressed the idea of smart harvesting where the kinetic energy coming from the environment can be used as input source of a piezoelectric transducer which is able to harvest the vibrational energy, to perform measures of vibrations and, at the same time, it is also suitable to transmit data through an optical system without the adoption of active conditioning architectures. In this paper a suitable nonlinear configuration will be investigated in order to demonstrate its advantage in presence of wideband mechanical energy. Comparison as respect linear oscillator will be here conducted and an experimental campaign will confirm the suitability of the proposed method.