Railway Vehicle Vibration Energy Harvesting using Nonlinear Resonators

Vibration is an available source of energy to supply electrical power demand of the freight wagons as it is one the most important challenges in railway engineering. Here we propose an efficient bistable mechanism with linear power take-off and nonlinear stiffness for energy harvesting of freight wagon vibrations. Design parameters of the bitable systems is optimized by genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) to extract maximum power. It is shown that remarkable enhancement can be achieved in comparison with conventional linear energy harvesters. The reason for this enhancement is harmonic oscillation between stable equilibrium points of the system which is very well matched with the nature of random excitation exerted by the rail irregularities.