A sustainable and enhanced-performance vibration energy harvester for application on railway bridge: Design, modeling, and analysis

This paper presents an enhanced-performance electromagnetic energy harvester (EPEEH) with sustainability for application in railway bridges. The unique feather of the proposed EPEEH is that it can collaborate to achieve bridge vibration suppression without side effects and generate 100 W-level output power. More specifically, the nonlinear dynamic response of the EPEEH is derived and is verified by the experimental results. The nonlinear characteristics of the EPEEH are analyzed numerically, which indicates that the damping coefficient and damping force decrease significantly with increasing load resistance. Additionally, the results indicated that the nonlinear counteracting force can be dynamically adjusted by varying the external load resistance, which is beneficial to achieve vibration suppression. Correspondingly, the maximum average output power can be obtained as 80.06 W (3 mm, 2 Hz single-frequency excitation), 92.43 W (3 mm, 2 Hz and 4 mm, 1 Hz dual-frequency excitation), and 69.46 W (2 mm, 2 Hz, 3 mm, 1.5 Hz, and 4 mm, 0.5 Hz three-frequency harmonic excitation). Meanwhile, the application test experiments are conducted to verify the practicability of the EPEEH. Overall, the EPEEH is promising to address the electricity requirement issue of wireless sensor networks that are configured on railway bridges, across sea road bridges, and canyon cable-stayed bridges.