Enhancing ability of harvesting energy from random vibration by decreasing the potential barrier of bistable harvester

•An improved BEH is developed by adding an additional magnet to reduce the barrier.•High efficiency of harvesting weak random vibration energy are realized by IBEH.•The additional magnet can be optimized to maximum the power for a certain intensity.

When a bistable energy harvester (BEH) is driven by weak random excitation, its harvesting efficiency will decrease due to the seldom occurrence of interwell motion. To overcome this defect, we developed an improved bistable energy harvester (IBEH) from BEH by adding a small magnet at the middle of two fixed magnets. It is proved that the attractive force originated from the additional magnet can pull down the potential barrier and shallow the potential well, but still keep the middle position of beam unstable. This can make jumping between potential wells easier. Thus IBEH can realize snap-through even at fairly weak excitation. The magnetic potential energy is given and the electromechanical equations are derived. Then the harvesting performance of IBEH under random excitation is studied. Validation experiments are designed and carried out. Comparisons prove that IBEH is preferable to BEH in harvesting random energy and can give out a high output voltage even at weak excitation. The size of additional magnet can be optimized to reach the best performance of IBEH.