A low profile vibro-impacting energy harvester with symmetrical stops

This paper reports on an investigation into the use of a vibro-impact approach to construct a relatively broadband kinetic energy harvester. Potentially, the vibro-impacting process may be exploited as an autotuning mechanism for energy harvesting in an environment where the source vibration spectrum varies in time, such as an aircraft in flight. The energy harvester examined in this paper is based on a vibro-impacting oscillator with double-sided, symmetrical, piezoelectric bimorph-stops. The energy harvester operates in the frequency range of 100-113 Hz and has a (non-optimized) maximum energy of 5.3 mW from an rms host vibration of 450 mG. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3521265]