A continuous broadband electromagnetic energy harvester based on amplitude and phase adjustments

Broadening the bandwidth of vibration energy harvesters is a critical issue for their practical implementations. Although utilizing multi-degree-of-freedoms is a frequently used solution to widen the operating frequency range, the resultant effective bandwidth could consist of discrete peaks (existing local minimum points lower than the half-power level) if the modal amplitudes have large differences at different frequencies. To solve these problems, we designed a new electromagnetic multi-modal energy harvester, which works in a broad and continuous low-frequency bandwidth. This is achieved by attaching the magnet and the coil to a compliant frame integrated with two different kinked beams, respectively. In this way, the voltage can be generated in a continuous and wide frequency range by adjusting the amplitudes and phases of the magnet and the coil in different modes according to a proposed design requirement. Finite element results and experimental results are in good agreement with each other, which validate the performance of the proposed harvester. The experimental results demonstrate that the half-power bandwidth can be achieved in the range of 15.0 Hz and the maximum peak power is 1.56 mW at the center frequency of 40.5 Hz under base excitation of the root-mean-square acceleration of 0.24 g. The broadband and high power density feature are also validated in a random excitation test, so that this harvester has great potential for practical applications.