Integrated Vibration Energy Harvesting and Structural Vibration Control: A State-of-the-Art Review of Electro-Mechanical Co-Design

Abstract

Vibration energy harvesters and vibration control devices have been typically designed as two distinct subsystems, one to harvest a small electrical output, and the other to reduce a mechanical response. The efficiency of the separation is becoming less and less efficient as the same electromechanical coupling which converts the strain or relative motion to electricity also alters the effective damping, stiffness, impedance and frequency response of the host structure. This paper summarizes the current status of integrated vibration energy harvesting and structural vibration control and focuses on co-design of the electro-mechanical systems. The field is organized for the review: transduction mechanism, integration architecture, control authority and bandwidth strategy. A unified energy-flow and coupled-dynamics framework is used to compare the performance of piezoelectric shunts, electromagnetic shunt dampers, energy-regenerative tuned mass dampers, nonlinear energy sinks, hybrid piezoelectric-electromagnetic devices, and triboelectric metamaterials and distributed piezoelectric metastructures. The overall finding is that performance should be judged in terms of a Pareto problem with respect to vibration response, harvested power, bandwidth, mass, control energy, reliability and implementation complexity, not on a single peak-power or attenuation norm. Passive systems and semi-active systems are most close to being practically deployed because they are self powered or nearly self powered and have a greater level of adaptability, but they will need to be carefully powered. Further advancements will rely on source-spectrum characterization, circuit-aware structural optimization, uncertainty quantification, durability testing and field testing and validation. A co design workflow is suggested to be developed to integrate mathematical models, multi-objective optimization and deployable sensing/ isolation systems.