Influence of Potential Parameters on the Bistable Energy Harvester Under Random Excitation

Abstract Environmental noise energy can be effectively captured by an energy harvester (EH) and then converted into usable electricity for low-powered monitoring sensors in aerospace vehicles. It is important to investigate the influence of potential well parameters on the energy harvesting performance under random excitation. Therefore, this paper theoretically derives the marginal probability density function (PDF), the joint PDF, and the averaging output power of the decoupled bistable energy harvester driven by the Gaussian white noise. First, the bistable energy harvester is linearized using the statistical linearization method, which is advantageous in obtaining coarse mean square values of outputs for further analysis. Second, the dimension of Fokker–Planck–Kolmogorov (FPK) equations is reduced by the state-space-split (SSS) method. Then, the approximate marginal and joint PDF can be obtained. Third, the influence of potential well width and height on PDFs and the averaging output power are, respectively, analyzed and discussed, respectively. Finally, the theoretical derivation is successfully validated by Monte Carlo simulations. Results show that the large potential well width can improve the averaging output power of the bistable EH under random excitation.