Neutrally stable vibration energy harvesting

This thesis brings together, for the first time, the fields of energy harvesting and static balancing. The proposal of two new architectures for the design of mechanical oscillators is supported by an extensive review on the existing energy harvesters. For the first one, a statically balanced oscillator, an analytically study proved it to be ineffective. This pushed for the development of a statically balanced frequency up-converter, that can integrate an energy harvester capable of coping with low frequencies vibrations of broadband nature. On the static balancing ground, a new mechanism is proposed, with the balancing of the folded suspension, a traditional mechanism of precision engineering. Numerical analysis suggests that high quality balancing is achieved for a large amplitude of motion. A preliminary study is also executed, introducing bond graph modeling to the field of energy harvesting. Bond graphs are a natural representation for the cross-domain nature of energy harvesters, allowing an integrative view.BMDBioMechanical EngineeringMechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineerin