The role of excitations statistic and nonlinearity in energy harvesting from random impulsive excitations

Design of an efficient energy harvester is now feasible as technology develops and a viable approach to solve this need is to exploit the concept and application of a nonlinear design. In this letter, we conducted a comparative analysis of linear and nonlinear piezoelectric energy harvesting from random impulsive excitations modelled by white Poisson noise. It is shown that the harvester performance depends on both nonlinearity and properties of ambient energy, and nonlinearity should be optimized for a given type of ambient vibration in order to achieve efficient harvesting.