Energy harvesting potential of tuned inertial mass electromagnetic transducers

The demand for developing renewable energy technologies has been growing in today's society. As one of promising renewable energy sources, large-scale energy harvesting from structural vibrations employing electromagnetic transducers has recently been proposed and considerable effort has been devoted to increase the power generation capability. In this paper, we introduce the mechanism of a tuned inertial mass electromagnetic transducer (TIMET), which can absorb vibratory energy more efficiently by tuning the parameters to adjust the system. Then we propose a new vibratory energy harvester with the TIMET and determine the parameter values for the device with a simple static admittance (SA) control law to maximize the energy harvested from a stationary stochastic disturbance. To investigate the energy harvesting potential of the TIMET further, the performance -guaranteed (PG) control and the LQG control proposed in the literature are applied as well. Then the numerical simulation studies are carried out and the effectiveness of the proposed energy harvester is examined by comparing the traditional electromagnetic transducers. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.