Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of a Multi-stable Energy Harvester for Rotation Motion

Recently, different kinds of nonlinear energy harvesters in rotation environments were designed to achieve high-efficiency broadband energy harvester for low-level excitations. However, a mathematical model of the multi-stable energy harvester in rotation motion is not complete, and its dynamic performance remains experimentally uninvestigated due to the difficulty of the sensor layout in rotation motion. Based on these issues, in this paper, a multi-stable energy harvester used in rotation motion is proposed and a related mathematical model has been processed by Lagrangian equation to describe the dynamic performance and the output power of the harvester. Additionally, corresponding experiments between the bi-stable energy harvester (BEH) and the tri-stable energy harvester (TEH) are carried out to validate their performance under different rotation speeds. The experimental results demonstrate that the TEH can obtain high-efficiency energy harvesting performance in low rotation speed than the BEH.