Abstract
A bridge vibration energy harvester has been developed in this paper using a Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) system, named hereafter Tuned Mass Generator (TMG). To harvest and make use of the unused reserve of energy the aforementioned damper system absorbs, an electromagnetic transducer has been applied. To investigate the configuration of the tuned mass generator considering performances of energy harvesting, the tuned mass generator is applied to an actual expressway bridge. According to the experiments on the trial bridge, it has been demonstrated that TMG generates electric power in watts order, which is much higher than other energy harvesters of structural vibration generators. It has been also clarified that TMG harvests enough energy for sensors or other low-power devices.
