A Dual-Mode Vibration Isolation Energy Harvester: Design, Analysis and Experiment

Vibration is a harmful disturbance that needs to be suppressed, but it is also a potential energy source that can be collected. Therefore, this paper presents a dual-mode (monostable and bistable) vibration isolation energy harvester. By adjusting the relative position of the magnets, it can switch between monostable and bistable configurations according to different excitation to get better vibration isolation performance. At the same time, electromagnetic energy harvesting is conducted through axial movement between the magnets. The parameters that influence whether the structure shows monostable or bistable characteristics are analyzed. Both vibration isolation and energy harvesting performance are compared through the Harmonic Balance Method and numerical method. Finally, an experiment is conducted to validate the theoretical analysis of vibration isolation and energy harvesting performance. It turns out that when the bistable system oscillator undergoes intra-well oscillation, it exhibits nonlinear characteristics opposite to the monostable system. Under large excitation amplitudes, the bistable system demonstrates significantly better vibration isolation performance than the monostable system. The bistable configuration has superior energy harvesting efficiency with the proposed structure.