Eur. Phys. J. B (2017) 90: 34
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2017-70703-x

Regular Article

Enhancing energy harvesting by coupling monostable oscillators

¹ Instituto de Investigaciones Físicas de Mar del Plata (IFIMAR, UNMdP&CONICET), FCEyN-UNMdP, Deán Funes 3350, B7602 AYL Mar del Plata, Argentina
² Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA, UC&CSIC), Avda. de los Castros, s/n, 39005 Santander, Spain
³ Universität Augsburg, Institut für Physik, Universitätstrasse 1, 86135 Augsburg, Germany
⁴ Nanosystems Initiative Munich, Schellingstrasse 4, 80799 München, Germany

^a e-mail: wio@ifca.unican.es

Received: 24 November 2016
Received in final form: 19 December 2016
Published online: 15 February 2017

Abstract

The performance of a ring of linearly coupled, monostable nonlinear oscillators is optimized towards its goal of acting as energy harvester – through piezoelectric transduction – of mesoscopic fluctuations, which are modeled as Ornstein-Uhlenbeck noises. For a single oscillator, the maximum output voltage and overall efficiency are attained for a soft piecewise-linear potential (providing a weak attractive constant force) but they are still fairly large for a harmonic potential. When several harmonic springs are linearly and bidirectionally coupled to form a ring, it is found that counter-phase coupling can largely improve the performance while in-phase coupling worsens it. Moreover, it turns out that few (two or three) coupled units perform better than more.