Investigation of an elastic boundary coupled bistable vibration energy harvester under different types of stochastic excitation

This paper investigates the stochastic dynamics of a novel bistable vibrational energy harvester with an appended elastic nonlinear boundary (BENB). The BENB system has demonstrated excellent performance for energy harvesting in the case of deterministic excitation but has not been tested under stochastic excitation. The main challenge addressed in the paper is to reveal how BENB performance is affected by a wideband or narrowband stochastic excitation, and what are the key parameters influencing BENB's performance in such an environment. The mathematical model of BENB is experimentally verified under stochastic excitation for the first time. The harvesting performance of BENB under stochastic excitations are carried out to established a theoretical stochastic response framework to guide the design. Subsequently, the comparative study demonstrates that the output power of BENB under a white Gaussian noise excitation and the band-limited white noise excitation is 46.57% and 17.83% higher than that of a linear elastic boundary coupled system under the same excitation levels. This advantage is more evident in comparison to monostable linear system. The results reveal that BENB has a wider operational bandwidth and higher output power due to the nonlinear elastic boundary coupling effect. It provides a new in-depth perspective of the elastic boundary coupled energy harvester and offers a feasible and effective approach to improve energy harvesting performance under different types of stochastic excitation.

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