Issues in vibration energy harvesting

In this study, fundamental issues related to bandwidth and nonlinear resonance in vibrational energy harvesting devices are investigated. The results show that using bandwidth as a criterion to measure device performance can be misleading. For a linear device, an enlarged bandwidth is achieved at the cost of sacrificing device performance near resonance, and thus widening the bandwidth may offer benefits only when the natural frequency of the linear device cannot match the dominant excitation frequency. For a nonlinear device, since the principle of superposition does not apply, the ''broadband” performance improvements achieved for single-frequency excitations may not be achievable for multi-frequency excitations. It is also shown that a large-amplitude response based on the traditional ''nonlinear resonance” does not always result in the optimal performance for a nonlinear device because of the negative work done by the excitation, which indicates energy is returned back to the excitation. Such undesired negative work is eliminated at global resonance, a generalized resonant condition for both linear and nonlinear systems. While the linear resonance is a special case of global resonance for a single-frequency excitation, the maximum potential of nonlinear energy harvesting can be reached for multi-frequency excitations by using global resonance to simultaneously harvest energy distributed over multiple frequencies.