Electromechanical Modeling and Experimental Verification of Nonlinear Hybrid Vibration Energy Harvester

This paper presents a novel nonlinear hybrid energy harvester (NHEH) combining the piezoelectric and electromagnetic harvesting mechanisms. It consists of a piezoelectric cantilever beam with a moving magnet as a part of proof mass and an opposing magnet attached on the frame. In addition, an electromagnetic generator was attached on the beam tip. An electromechanical coupling model of the hybrid energy harvester was established based on energy method. An experimental system was built up to verify the theoretical analysis. Both experiments and simulation show significant improvements in bandwidth and output power from the nonlinear vibration generator. The prototype shows nearly 83.3% increase than the optimized piezoelectric energy harvester in the operating bandwidth at the 1g m/s(2) excitation level.