Enhancing energy harvesting by coupling monostable oscillators

TL;DR

This paper investigates how coupling monostable oscillators in a ring can enhance energy harvesting from mesoscopic fluctuations, revealing optimal configurations and coupling strategies for improved piezoelectric output.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of coupled monostable oscillators for energy harvesting, highlighting the effects of coupling phase and number of units on performance.

Findings

Counter-phase coupling improves energy harvesting efficiency.

Few coupled units outperform larger rings.

Optimal potential shape varies with performance metrics.

Abstract

The performance of a ring of linearly coupled, monostable nonlinear oscillators is optimized towards its goal of acting as energy harvester---through piezoelectric transduction---of mesoscopic fluctuations, which are modeled as Ornstein--Uhlenbeck noises. For a single oscillator, the maximum output voltage and overall efficiency are attained for a soft piecewise-linear potential (providing a weak attractive constant force) but they are still fairly large for a harmonic potential. When several harmonic springs are linearly and bidirectionally coupled to form a ring, it is found that counter-phase coupling can largely improve the performance while in-phase coupling worsens it. Moreover, it turns out that few (two or three) coupled units perform better than more.