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
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.
Key words: Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
© EDP Sciences, Società Italiana di Fisica, Springer-Verlag, 2017
