An experimentally validated parametrically excited vibration energy harvester with time-varying stiffness

Vibration energy harvesting is the transformation of vibration energy to electrical energy. The motivation of this work is to use vibration energy harvesting to power wireless sensors that could be used in inaccessible or hostile environments to transmit information for condition health monitoring. Although considerable work has been done in the area of energy harvesting, there is still a demand for making a robust and small vibration energy harvesters from random excitations in a real environment that can produce a reliable amount of energy. Parametrically excited harvesters can have time-varying stiffness. Parametric amplification is used to tune vibration energy harvesters to maximize energy gains at system superharmonics, often at twice the first natural frequency. In this paper the parametrically excited harvester with cubic and cubic parametric nonlinearity is introduced as a novel work. The advantages of having cubic and cubic nonlinearity are explained theoretically and experimentally.