抄録
In this work, a smart energy harvester that acquires electrical energy from structural vibrations was developed. The energy harvester contains a digital processor that works by the harvested energy, which enables us to apply a technical method improving the efficiency of energy translation. This technical method, we call it energy recycling method, is achieved by observing the vibration displacements and adequately regulating electric switches in the harvester circuitry. Those requirements can be satisfied by the built-in digital processor. The driving energy for the digital processor is supplied from a storage capacitor that stores the energy harvested from structural vibrations. Consequently, the smart energy harvester can operates intelligently with digital processing and enhance the electrical energy generation, nevertheless any batteries and electrical power supply are not required. As an advantage of the digital processing, an observation approach of Kalman-filter is utilized for the modal estimation of the structural vibration. The digital filtering separates the measured displacements data to each modal value, such as first vibration mode and second vibration mode. It is also instrumental in reducing observation noises. In this paper, we describe basic configuration of the smart energy harvester equipped with a digital processor and present some experimental results that show the generation capability and robustness of the harvester compared with Standard harvester. Experiments of performing energy supply to a resistance-load or a capacitor-load are conducted to evaluate the generation capability. Experiments under the conditions of electrical noise mixed are conducted to verify the robustness of the smart energy harvester. These experimental results revealed that the smart energy harvester can generate larger electrical energy than Standard harvester, and it accurately works in also noise mixed condition, which expresses the advantage of the smart energy-harvester for multimodal vibrations.
