Bursting vibration-based energy harvesting

The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that bursting oscillations can be exploited to enhance the harvested electrical power. A vibration-based bistable Duffing energy harvester, a tristable energy harvester and an asymmetric bistable energy harvester are examined, and bursting oscillations are observed in the energy-harvesting systems with periodic excitation when an order gap exists between the exciting frequency and the natural frequency. The bifurcation mechanism of the bursting oscillations is presented via the bifurcation diagram and the transformed phase portrait of fast subsystem, which reveals that fold bifurcations occur at the transition between the quiescent states and the repetitive spiking states. Then, we investigate the influence of resistive load on the output power, and the optimal resistance is employed to determine the maximum of the power. Furthermore, compared with the method of traditional resonance energy harvesting, results clearly illustrate an improved output power.