The benefits of noise and nonlinearity: Extracting energy from random vibrations

Nonlinear behavior is the ordinary feature of the vast majority of dynamical systems and noise is commonly present in any finite temperature physical and chemical system. In this article we briefly review the potentially beneficial outcome of the interplay of noise and nonlinearity by addressing the novel field of vibration energy harvesting. The role of nonlinearity in a piezoelectric harvester oscillator dynamics is modeled with nonlinear stochastic differential equation.