Harvesting Energy from a Series of Harvesters

Increase in usage of small electronics and environment threat that batteries provide have accelerated the research in energy harvesting in the last decade. The main challenges in energy harvesting are to increase the operating frequency bandwidth of harvesters and to increase the amount of power harvested. Multiple tuned harvesters have gained a lot of attention in alleviating these challenges. Attaining perfect tuning is a challenge and mistuning is inherent in systems. This study looks into the effect of mistuning in a set of harvesters that are designed to be perfectly tuned. The harvester set is considered to be a set of nonlinear oscillators that represent pendulum-based energy harvester. Four different arrangements among the oscillators are considered. These are (a) series of independent harvesters, (b) series of independent but mistuned harvesters, (c) interacting harvesters, and (d) interacting but mistuned harvesters. In all these cases, base excitation is imparted to the system and physics of the system is studied. It is observed that in the mistuned cases bandwidth is larger when compared to the tuned cases.