Energy harvesting using semi-active control

This paper presents the application of semi-active control for optimising the power harvested by an electro-mechanical energy harvester. A time-periodic damper, defined by a Fourier series, is introduced for energy harvesting in order to increase the performance of the device. An analytical solution for the transmissibility and the average absorbed power is derived based on the method of harmonic balance. The coefficients of the semi-active model are optimised to maximise the harvested power. The harvested power from the optimum periodic time-varying damper at a particular frequency is compared and is shown to be greater than that from an optimum passive damper and a semi-active on–off damper not only at that particular frequency but also at other frequencies. In addition, the performance of the optimised periodic time-varying damper is also compared with an arbitrary semi-active time-periodic damper, which has the same transmissibility at resonance. An optimisation is carried out to maximise the power in a frequency range and the optimum damper is derived as a function of the excitation frequency. The numerical results are validated with the analytical approach.