Exploiting a novel magnetoelastic tunable bi-stable energy converter for vibration energy mitigation

In recent years, scavenging vibration energy from changeable excitations for flexible self-powering of microelectronic devices has become an emerging benchmark for energy reuse. Multi-stable nonlinear energy sink (MNES) has received extensive attention due to their simple structure, small mass, high efficiency and wide effective frequency bandwidth. Vibration energy harvester (VEH) and MNES have the common characteristic of redistributing vibration energy, therefore, a new energy strategy of merging the two is expected to achieve efficient vibration suppression and energy conversion simultaneously. In this work, a novel bionic-dipteran magnetoelastic bi-stable dynamic vibration absorber (BDMB-DVA) with active adjustable stiffness is proposed. Considering the continuous harmonic vibration as the input energy, the energy conversion and targeted energy transfer (TET) performance of the BDMB-DVA system are evaluated theoretically. The energy conversion efficiency of the BDMB-DVA under harmonic excitation is investigated; Moreover, the vibration suppression performance of the BDMB-DVA under swept excitations is investigated. Finally, experimental verification is conducted to understand the practical TET and energy conversion performance. It is obviously found that the proposed BDMB-DVA with very small mass ratio achieves broadband TET and energy conversion performance under weak ambient vibrations. Efforts of archetypal experimental verification are implemented to demonstrate the state-of-the-art energy transfer and conversion performance of the BDMB-DVA. This integrated energy conversion and vibration control strategy is a potential alternative for intelligent structural health monitoring and sound broadband vibration control of state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment under multisource vibration disturbance.