Nonlinear Methodologies in Transduction Mechanisms for Energy Harvesting and Sensors

Abstract

The constant need of improving performance of transducers has pushed scientists to searching novel solutions in transduction mechanisms. The development of theories about Stochastic Resonance and the interplay between nonlinearity and noise represents one of the proposed strategies to improve performance of actual transducers in certain operating conditions. Among nonlinear systems, bistable mechanisms have been investigated in this work. Several results of their application in the field of energy harvesting from mechanical vibrations and in the sensing of AC currents are presented with a special focus on the benefits due to their adoption in specific applications where traditional approaches based on linear transduction mechanisms exhibit issues in efficiency. A special attention is also paid to the technological solutions to implement prototypes of integrated bistable devices and several rapid prototyping strategies are investigated and proposed.