A Self-Propelled Mechanism to Increase Range of Bistable Operation of a Piezoelectric Cantilever-Based Vibration Energy Harvester.

In our previous works, we presented a method to increase the harvested energy from vibrations using a piezoelectric cantilever and to increase the frequency range of operation by introducing bistability with the use of magnetic repulsion. However, for small excitations, the cantilever may not be able to overcome the magnetic repulsive force but vibrate at one of its two equilibrium positions with reduced amplitude. This work introduces a method of increasing the range of excitations over which the operation remains bistable.