Enhancing energy harvesting by coupling monostable oscillators

H. S. WIO; R. R. DEZA; J. I. PEÑA ROSSELLÓ; P. HÄNGGI

Gubbio

Conferencia; International Conference "Micro Energy 2017"; 2017

Universita degli Studi di Perugia

The performance of a ring of linearly coupled, monostable nonlinear oscillators is optimized towards its goal of acting as energy harvester ? through piezoelectric transduction ? of mesoscopic fluctuations, which are modeled as Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noises. For a single oscillator, the maximum output voltage and overall efficiency are attained for a soft piecewise-linear potential (providing a weak attractive constant force) but they are still fairly large for a harmonic potential. When several harmonic springs are linearly and bidirectionally coupled to form a ring, it is found that counter-phase coupling can largely improve the performance while in-phase coupling worsens it. Moreover, it turns out that few (two or three) coupled units perform better than more.