Nonlinear dynamics of a circular piezoelectric plate for vibratory energy harvesting

Nonlinear behaviors are investigated for a vibration-based energy harvester. The harvester consists of a circular composite plate with the clamped boundary, a proof mass and two steel rings. The lumped parameter model of the harvester is established and the parameters are identified from the experiment. The measured nonlinear behaviors can be approximately described by the lumped model. Both the experimental and the numerical results demonstrate that the circular plate harvester has soft characteristics under low excitation and both hard characteristics and soft characteristics under high excitation. The experimental results show that the output voltage can achieve over 35 V (about 50 mW) and more than 14 Hz of bandwidth with 25 kΩ load resistance.