Energy harvesting from a DE-based soft pendulum

This paper proposes a DE-based soft pendulum that is capable of converting the vibrational energy into electrical energy. A theoretical analysis model is developed to investigate the energy harvesting performance of the DE-based soft pendulum with diverse dimensional, electrical and dynamic parameters, which shows a good agreement with the experiment results. The research results show that there is an optimal resistance to maximize the average power density, and the optimal resistance can decrease with the increase in the initial voltage of the DE. When the natural frequency of the designed pendulum is equal to the excitation frequency, the maximum average power density can be achieved. In addition, the maximum average power density can be improved by enlarging the mass of the pendulum and the initial voltage of the DE, and reducing the initial length of the DE. The proposed model can serve as guidance for optimizing the energy harvesting system in future studies.