TERFENOL-D BASED TRANSDUCER FOR POWER HARVESTING FROM VIBRATION

Paper in proceeding, 2007

The proposed paper addresses the problem of vibration-to-electric energy conversion using giant magnetostrictive material – TERFENOL-D. Both theoretical and experimental results of the study of performance of magnetostrictive transducer which was built at Chalmers University of Technology are presented. The mathematical models have been developed for modeling of magnetostrictive transducer based on constitutive equations of magnetoelastic behavior of TERFENOL-D rod and standard formulae of electromagnetism for induced voltage and current in the pick-up coil due to variation of magnetic field. The developed models are used to evaluate induced voltage and electrical power output for displacement driven and as well as force driven transducers. Several experiments using test rig generating periodic excitations with frequency up to 1000 Hz have been conducted for newly developed physical prototype of transducer having TERFENOL-D rod with 50 mm in length and 15 mm in diameter as active material. The validity of the transducer model is illustrated by comparison simulation data with experiment. The obtained results of the study the vibration-to-electric energy conversion using TERFENOL-D have confirmed the potential of using giant magnetostrictive materials for power harvesting from vibration. A video showing the Chalmers built MEG in operation can be seen via web link http://www.mvs.chalmers.se/~berbyuk/chalmers_meg_050404.MOV