Smart Railway Transportation: Self-Powered and Self-Sensing Vibration Energy Harvester

Safety monitoring sensors in smart railways need a sustainable onboard power supply. This article proposes a counter-rotating gear energy harvester (CG-EH) to convert the longitudinal vibration energy of trains into electricity for onboard sensors.CG-EH consists of a vibration input module, a motion conversion module, and an energy conversion module. The vibration input module converts the longitudinal displacement of the coupler into the rotational motion of the gears. The motion conversion module realizes the conversion of the reciprocating input displacement into the unidirectional rotation based on a counter-rotating gear set, multi-stage spur gear sets can effectively mitigate the effects of excitation on CG-EH. The energy conversion module transforms the kinetic energy of the unidirectional rotation into electrical energy through a generator. Experimental results show that the energy outputs of CG-EH are improved with longitudinal vibration compared with the usual onboard energy harvester. From the result, the peak output power of CG-EH is 14.59 W, the peak efficiency reaches 39.2%, enough to power relevant onboard sensors. Moreover, CG-EH can monitor the running status of trains based on deep learning. From the experiment results and application prospects, CG-EH is a favorable solution for the power supply problems of onboard sensors in smart railways.