vibration suppression and energy harvesting with a variant nonlinear energy sink
abstract
vibration control is aimed to suppress or eliminate unwanted vibration to ensure proper
operation of machines. on the other hand, energy harvesting intends to scavenge energy from
ambient vibrations to power electronical devices such as wireless sensors. it is much desired to
achieve simultaneous vibration control and energy harvesting. a great amount of effort has been
focused on the use of a linear vibration absorber for this purpose. the shortcoming of such an
approach is that its effectiveness is limited to a narrow bandwidth of frequency.
the goal of this research is to develop a device in order to achieve simultaneous vibration
suppression and energy harvesting in a broad frequency band. instead of using a linear vibration
absorber, a nonlinear energy sink (nes) is considered. since it is very challenging to realize a true
nes as it requires a zero linear stiffness, this study focus on developing a variant nes that
possesses a low linear stiffness but high nonlinear stiffness. three designs and their corresponding
apparatus are introduced. a base excitation is conducted to determine the spring restoring force in
order to character the stiffness of each design. the apparatus that best emulates the nes is chosen.
a stiff primary system and a flexible primary system are also developed by changing the primary
spring’s stiffness. the behaviors of the chosen variant nes are further investigated in two
combined system: weakly coupled one (a stiff primary system plus the variant nes) and the
strongly coupled one (a flexible primary system plus the variant nes). the transient responses of
the two combined systems are investigated numerically and experimentally. the steady state
responses of the two combined systems to a harmonic base excitation are investigated in
numerically and experimentally. the results from both the weakly coupled and the strongly
coupled systems show some typical features of the nes: 1:1 resonance, targeted energy transfer
(tet), initial energy or excitation level dependence, jumping phenomena, and strongly modulated
response (smr), etc.