Broadband vibration energy harvester based on nonlinear magnetic force and rotary pendulums

A broadband vibration energy harvester based on nonlinear magnetic force and rotary pendulums is proposed in this paper. The harvester is mainly composed of a magnetoelectric transducer and a rotary pendulum fixed with four permanent magnets. In order to improve the working bandwidth of the harvester, two pairs of permanent magnets are added in the middle of the rotary pendulum by using magnetic nonlinearity. The mechanical - magnetic - electrical analytical model of the harvester is established, and the theoretical value obtained by the model is basically consistent with the experimental value. The results show that the harvester has a strong nonlinearity through the magnetic force. When the acceleration is 0.4 g, some typical testing results are as follows: the resonant frequency is 19 Hz, maximum peak-peak voltage is 94.1 V, half power bandwidth is 15.8 Hz, center frequency is 26.9 Hz, and the ratio of half power bandwidth to the center frequency is 58.73 %.

A magnetoelectric vibration converter with tunable resonance frequency / Magnetoelektrischer Vibrationswandler mit einstellbarer Resonanzfrequenz

Integration of smart materials to harvest energy from low vibration sources for powering wireless sensor networks has been of significant interest and still is. Owing to large magnetostriction and energy density of Terfenol- D, the use of piezoelectric/Terfenol-D composites exhibit great potential for the realization of vibration converters. In this work, a magnetoelectric vibration converter is dpresented. The interaction between the magnetic circuit and the magnetoelectric transducer is employed to tune the resonance frequency of the converter.

Magnetoelectric Transducer Designs for Use as Wireless Power Receivers in Wearable and Implantable Applications

As the size of biomedical implants and wearable devices becomes smaller, the need for methods to deliver power at higher power densities is growing. The most common method to wirelessly deliver power, inductively coupled coils, suffers from poor power density for very small-sized receiving coils. An alternative strategy is to transmit power wirelessly to magnetoelectric (ME) or mechano-magnetoelectric (MME) receivers, which can operate efficiently at much smaller sizes for a given frequency. This work studies the effectiveness of ME and MME transducers as wireless power receivers for biomedical implants of very small (<2 mm3) size. The comparative study clearly demonstrates that under existing safety standards, the ME architecture is able to generate a significantly higher power density than the MME architecture. Analytical models for both types of transducers are developed and validated using centimeter scale devices. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP) standards were applied to the lumped elements models which were then used to optimize device dimensions within a 2 mm3 volume. An optimized ME device can produce 21.3 mW/mm3 and 31.3 W/mm3 under the IEEE and ICNIRP standards, respectively, which are extremely attractive for a wide range of biomedical implants and wearable devices.