Combining sustainable stochastic resonance with high-energy orbit oscillation to broaden rotational bandwidth of energy harvesting from tire

The efficient harvesting of mechanical energy from ambient vibrations is an ongoing project. Recent research has shown that nonlinear energy harvesters can generally overcome many significant disadvantages of linear harvesters arising from their narrow bandwidth. This paper proposes an energy harvester within an automotive tire that boasts the advantages of nonlinear systems to increase the harvesting bandwidth by combining stochastic resonance with high-energy orbit oscillations. A major challenge in this automotive application is the wide variation in tire speeds over which harvesting can take place. Stochastic resonance has some benefits here, particularly at low speeds at which high-energy orbit oscillations may not otherwise occur. Thus, as the speed of the vehicle and, therefore, a high-energy orbit oscillation of the harvester can be stimulated, the operating frequency of the harvester increases due to the presence of stochastic resonance and can be maintained as the speed of the vehicle increases or decreases. The results of numerical simulations and laboratory experiments show that the effective bandwidth of energy harvesting increased from 31 rad/s to 129.4 rad/s and the maximum power generated reached 0.21 mW, with a mean value of 35.6 μW, entirely through a combination of sustainable stochastic resonance and high-energy orbit oscillations within the harvester. Thus, by combining these two phenomena, the efficient bandwidth of rotation can be further extended to enhance the overall capability of tire-based energy harvesting.