Practical vibration energy harvesting for structural health monitoring

• Main Author: Guo, Xinrui
• Other Authors: Yang Yaowen
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Civil engineering::Structures and design
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/71524
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Structural health monitoring (SHM) for buildings and infrastructures, such as residence, hospital, bridge and tunnel, is essential and important. Sensors are installed at the strategic locations of the structures to monitor and detect whether it is structurally safe or tend to collapse. In recent years, wireless sensors start to replace traditional hard wired sensors and show good properties of portability and flexibility. However, the traditional electrochemical batteries have been and are still used as the most common power resource for wireless sensors, which fail to keep up with the demands. Limited life batteries with large physical size require periodic maintenance and replacement. Thus, researchers have been looking for sustainable resources such as solar, wind, and vibration energy. A lot of researches have been done on harvesting these ambient energy sources to let wireless sensors be self-powered. Importantly, it is basic to consider the availability of energy sources. For instance, both vibration and wind are available at bridges while only vibration is effective at rails. In this project, an efficient energy harvester is firstly designed under both vibration and wind condition. Further, the study will concentrate on the design for the situation that only vibration energy is present. The performance of the proposed nonlinear harvester with different stiffness configurations will be compared with the linear counterpart to investigate the bandwidth broadening capabilities.