Energy harvesting: vibration powered generators with non-linear compliance

Completed

Other Power and Storage Technologies(Electric power conversion)
Renewable Energy Sources(Other Renewables)

Basic and strategic applied research

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY (Electrical and Electronic Engineering)

Not Cross-cutting

Dr SG Burrow
Aerospace Engineering
University of Bristol

Standard

EPSRC

28 January 2008

27 January 2011

36 months

£197,318

Electrical engineering

South West

Systems -- Materials, Mechanical and Medical Eng

Dr SG Burrow, Aerospace Engineering, University of Bristol

Professor A R Champneys, Engineering Mathematics, University of Bristol

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 todesign vibration powered generators with non-linear spring elements and hence improve their performance, making them applicable in a wider variety of applications

29/05/07