Efficient harmonic oscillator chain energy harvester driven by colored noise

TL;DR

This paper investigates an electromechanical harmonic oscillator chain for energy harvesting from colored noise vibrations, demonstrating significantly improved power output and efficiency over single oscillators through numerical simulations and analytical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a harmonic oscillator chain as a novel energy harvester, showing enhanced performance compared to traditional single oscillators, supported by numerical and analytical methods.

Findings

Harmonic chain outperforms single oscillators in power and efficiency

Numerical simulations confirm the enhanced performance

Analytical approximation agrees with numerical results

Abstract

We study the performance of an electromechanical harmonic oscillator chain as an energy harvester to extract power from finite-bandwidth ambient random vibrations, which are modelled by colored noise. The proposed device is numerically simulated and its performance assessed by means of the net electrical power generated and its efficiency in converting the external noise-supplied power into electrical power. Our main result is a much enhanced performance, both in the net electrical power delivered and in efficiency, of the harmonic chain with respect to the popular single oscillator resonator. Our numerical findings are explained by means of an analytical approximation, in excellent agreement with numerics.