Energy harvesting via an adaptive bistable potential

TL;DR

This paper introduces a passive adaptive bistable energy harvester employing a buy-low-sell-high strategy, significantly enhancing efficiency under low-frequency, non-stationary excitations compared to traditional bistable and linear harvesters.

Contribution

It proposes a novel passive adaptive bistable system with a buy-low-sell-high strategy, improving energy harvesting efficiency in challenging real-world conditions.

Findings

High efficiency under harmonic and non-stationary excitations

Outperforms conventional bistable and linear harvesters

Robust performance across various excitation types

Abstract

Narrow bandwidth and easy detuning, inefficiency in broadband and non-stationary excitations, and difficulties in matching linear harvester's resonance frequency to low-frequency excitations at small scales, have convinced the researchers to investigate the nonlinear, in particular the bistable energy harvesters in the recent years. However, the bistable harvesters suffer from co-existing low and high energy orbits, and sensitivity to initial conditions, and have been recently proven inefficient when subjected to many real-world random and non-stationary excitations. Here, we propose a novel buy-low-sell-high strategy that can significantly improve the harvester's efficiency at low-frequencies in a much more robust fashion. This strategy could be realized by a passive adaptive bistable system. Simulation results confirm high efficiency of the adaptive bistable system following a buy-low-sell-high logic when subjected to harmonic and random non-stationary walking excitations compared to its conventional bistable and linear counterparts.