Broadband energy harvesting via magnetic coupling between two movable magnets

Harvesting energy from ambient mechanical vibrations by the piezoelectric effect has been proposed for powering microelectromechanical systems and replacing batteries that have a finite life span. A conventional piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) is usually designed as a linear resonator, and suffers from a narrow operating bandwidth. To achieve broadband energy harvesting, in this paper we introduce a concept and describe the realization of a novel nonlinear PEH. The proposed PEH consists of a primary piezoelectric cantilever beam coupled to an auxiliary piezoelectric cantilever beam through two movable magnets. For predicting the nonlinear response from the proposed PEH, lumped parameter models are established for the two beams. Both simulation and experiment reveal that for the primary beam, the introduction of magnetic coupling can expand the operating bandwidth as well as improve the output voltage. For the auxiliary beam, the magnitude of the output voltage is slightly reduced, but additional output is observed at off-resonance frequencies. Therefore, broadband energy harvesting can be obtained from both the primary beam and the auxiliary beam.