Excitation of energy harvesters using stick-slip motion

During the past decades a large number of energy harvesting systems with the ability to transform mechanical energy into electrical energy have been proposed, ranging from systems exhibiting pure sinusoidal motion to stochastic systems. However, to date little emphasis has been put on stick-slip motion as a method for excitation of energy harvesting systems. Stick-slip motion can be associated with both microscopic and macroscopic processes and is omnipresent. The motion can be characterized by two stages. In the first stage there is buildup of elastic energy with little associated motion, whereas in the second stage the elastic energy is released into kinetic energy. We study here the spectral signal characteristics of two different electrical generators excited by stick-slip motion: a piezoelectric macro fiber composite and a triboelectric generator. The force and the voltage generated during the motion were monitored, and we found that the signal spectral density of both variables changes with the frequency in a characteristic manner, thus classifying the slip-stick motion as a colored noise excitation scheme. The force spectral density in both systems was found to exhibit a power-law spectrum following an f(-2) trend, where f is the frequency. The voltage spectral density was governed by the product of a high-pass filter, the force spectral density, and the intrinsic generator spectral density. Here the piezoelectric generator exhibited a nearly flat voltage spectral density below the cutoff frequency of the high-pass filter and an f(-2) spectrum at higher frequencies, thus demonstrating that the piezoelectric coupling coefficient had a nearly flat frequency response. On the other hand, the triboelectric generator had a coupling coefficient with a spectral response that varied in a non-systematic manner, possibly related to the large number of contact sites and relaxation times occurring during operation. The average power delivered by the generators to a resistive load was also measured for sinusoidal mechanical excitations and was compared with the average power generated by stick-slip motion.