Harvesting energy from bridge vibration by piezoelectric structure with magnets tailoring potential energy

Bridges play an increasingly more important role in modern transportation, which is why many sensors are mounted on it in order to provide safety. However, supplying reliable power to these sensors has always been a great challenge. Scavenging energy from bridge vibration to power the wireless sensors has attracted more attention in recent years. Moreover, it has been proved that the linear energy harvester cannot always work efficiently since the vibration energy of the bridge distributes over a broad frequency band. In this paper, a nonlinear energy harvester is proposed to enhance the performance of harvesting bridge vibration energy. Analyses on potential energy, restoring force, and stiffness were carried out. By adjusting the separation distance between magnets, the harvester could own a low and flat potential energy, which could help the harvester oscillate on a high-energy orbit and generate high output. For validation, corresponding experiments were carried out. The results show that the output of the optimal configuration outperforms that of the linear one. Moreover, with the increase in vehicle speed, a component of extremely low frequency is gradually enhanced, which corresponds to the motion on the high-energy orbit. This study may give an effective method of harvesting energy from bridge vibration excited by moving vehicles with different moving speeds.