Maximizing Harvested Energy for Linear Vibration-based generators

Abstract

This work presents a new method that increases the energy conversion for linear vibration-based generators. Actually, these generators are chosen to have their resonance frequency equal to the ambient vibration frequency that provides the maximum power amplitude of the acceleration. Nevertheless, there is a resonance frequency at which the acceleration power amplitude is lower but the energy is substantially higher since ambient vibration signals have several frequency components. A new method performing a spectrogram analysis, which does not miss the temporal information, as the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) analysis does, is realized. Thus, the harvested energy is considered instead of the harvested power. The method presented in this paper is validated with several real experiments.