Energy harvesting: vibration powered generators with non-linear compliance

利用环境振动发电是已经提出的为电子电路提供可再生电源的多种技术之一。典型的应用包括监测人体内部参数或大型土木结构内部条件的无线传感器。由于这些应用必须是小型的振动发电机，除非仔细优化设备，否则很难在如此小的体积内产生足够的功率。振动发电机使用共振质量/弹簧装置将微小振动放大到可用的水平，拟议的研究将调查当弹簧元件具有非线性柔度(即力不再与频率成正比)时，该共振系统的行为。这一点很重要，因为由于制造，特别是小规模的制造，以及由于磁力或静电力，可能会出现非线性。拟议的研究将为设计具有非线性弹簧元件的振动发电机提供分析技术，从而改善其性能，使其适用于更广泛的应用。

Generating power from ambient vibrations is one of a number of techniques that have been proposed to provide a renewable power source for electronic circuits. Typical applications include wireless sensors to monitor parameters inside the human body or conditions inside a large civil structure.Because of the applications vibration powered generators have to be small and it can be difficult to produce sufficient power in such a small volume unless the device is careful optimised. Vibration powered generators use a resonant mass/spring arrangement to amplify the small vibrations to a useable level and the proposed research will investigate how this resonant system behaves when the spring element has a non-linear compliance i.e. force is no longer proportional to frequency. This is important since non-linearities can occur because of manufacturing, particularly at small scales, and because of magnetic or electrostatic forces.The proposed research will provide analytical techniques to design vibration powered generators with non-linear spring elements and hence improve their performance, making them applicable in a wider variety of applications.