Bi-stable energy harvesting driven by random excitation

At Cnam, Paris, September 8th 2017, 2 p.m.

Americo Cunha
Assistant Professor, Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME), Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), Brazil
Personal website

The advent of the Internet of Things brings with it a technological challenge associated with the development of new technologies to supply energy to micro-sensors of the most diverse types. Energy harvesting devices are essential in this context, being the search for strategies to maximize the power recovered by these devices a topic of great interest in engineering.

This work deals with the study of the efficiency of a bi-stable harvesting device excited by a random signal. For this purpose, it presents the construction of a consistent stochastic model of uncertainties to describe the non-linear dynamic behaviour of the bi-stable system. The physical system of interest consists of a energy harvesting device based on a piezo-magneto-elastic beam, subject to effects of large displacements, modeled by a system of 3 nonlinear differential equations. Uncertainties in the external loading are take into account through a parametric probabilistic approach, where the external excitation is represented by Karhunen-Loève decomposition and Monte Carlo method is employed to compute the propagation of uncertainties through the stochastic model.