An Experimental Investigation of P-Bifurcation, Energy Harvesting and Vibration Suppression Using a Nonlinear Inerter Device

Abstract This work investigates the vibration suppression and energy harvesting capabilities of an inerter pendulum vibration absorber (IPVA) when applied to a single degree of freedom structure subjected to Gaussian broadband base excitation which was analytically treated as white noise. An IPVA which was previously studied by the authors was attached to a DC generator to experimentally investigate the energy harvesting and vibration mitigation capabilities of the device in connection with P-bifurcation. A formal characterization of the system’s unknown parameters was done and all measured, calculated, and experimentally determined parameters were presented along with four resistive load considerations including the open circuit configuration. Next, an analytically derived P-bifurcation boundary in the noise intensity versus electrical and friction damping plane was presented and the boundaries were verified with an experiment. The power spectral densities for electric power and relative suspended mass velocity were determined for the system with the IPVA and compared with that of the best tested linear system. A correlation between poor energy harvesting and a monomodal PDF was made apparent, while the mean and resonant peak power was enhanced by a factor of as much as four and two, respectively. The peak value for the relative velocity power spectral density was improved by as much as a factor of four near resonance and the mean square relative velocity by a factor of two.