Vibration-based energy harvesting using a van der Pol oscillator under harmonic excitation

This paper examines vibration-based electromagnetic energy harvesting (EH) using a driven van der Pol (vdP) oscillator with an external periodic excitation combined to a storage circuit. The EH performance of the harvester system is investigated with the vdP oscillator and compared with that of a damped purely linear harmonic (DPLH) oscillator. The slow-flow equations describing vibration and output power solutions are established based on the averaging and harmonic balance methods. These methods yield approximate analytical solutions for periodic vibration and output power responses. A second-order perturbation method is applied to the slow-flow equations to obtain approximate quasiperiodic (QP) solutions for the vibration and output power. The influence of the considered parameters on the output power is studied for periodic and in the QP regimes. This study demonstrates the advantage of using a vdP oscillator enabling EH in both the periodic and QP regimes. The results demonstrate that energy can be efficiently harvested in both regimes, depending on the selected system parameters. Numerical simulations were conducted to validate the analytical predictions.