Drastic bandwidth enhancement of bistable energy harvesters: Study of subharmonic behaviors and their stability robustness

Thomas Huguet, Adrien Badel, Olivier Druet and Mickaël Lallart

Applied Energy, 2018, vol. 226, issue C, 607-617

Abstract: In order to provide a serious alternative to chemical batteries for the energy supply of isolated sensors, bistable generators have been enthusiastically highlighted in recent years for their ability to harvest vibration energy over a wider frequency range compared to linear generators. Nevertheless, these bistable harvesters are generally characterized through a frequency sweep which does not reveal all the steady-state behaviors they can reach and therefore their full energy harvesting potential. Among such behaviors, subharmonic motions are hidden by this classical characterization and therefore had not received a lot of attention. This study proposes an original complete analytical analysis of subharmonic orbits for energy harvesting to predict their contribution to the global bandwidth of bistable generators. In addition, a new criterion, referred as stability robustness, is introduced to estimate the sensitivity of those behaviors to disturbances of different levels, allowing to finely and accurately estimate suitable behaviors for energy harvesting purposes in realistic conditions (behaviors easy to reach and maintain in time). Experimental results conducted with a buckled beam based electromagnetic generator confirm the relevance of this criterion showing good agreement with the analytical predictions. Subharmonic behaviors finally appear, both theoretically and experimentally, to be of significant interest, as exploiting them leads to a 180% increase of the global operating frequency range of the considered bistable energy harvester, for which more than 100 µW are generated on a 70 Hz bandwidth at 0.5 g.

Keywords: Bistable; Nonlinear; Energy harvesting; Vibration; Subharmonic; Robustness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261918308808
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:226:y:2018:i:c:p:607-617

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.06.011

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().