Effects of railway track vibration induced by passing trains on an energy harvesting device

• Main Author: Cleante, Vinícius Germanos [UNESP]
• Publication Date: 2015
• Format: Master thesis
• Language: eng
• Source: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Download full: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/128026; http://www.athena.biblioteca.unesp.br/exlibris/bd/cathedra/30-09-2015/000849610.pdf
• topic: Energia - Armazenamento; Osciladores harmônicos; Vibração; Harmonic oscillators

With advances in technology, and with the need to seek for solutions to reduce the effects of global warming, makes energy harvesting a popular research topic. The particular interest in this project is the harvesting of energy from ambient vibrations, which has applications in hostile environments or in remote areas. This type of device has the capacity feed microelectromechanical systems that use a low power, for example sensors for structural health monitoring, wireless sensors, radio communications, etc. In this work, an investigation is conducted to determine how much energy can be scavenged from vibrations due the passage of a train. A study is conducted to investigate the optimum parameters design of an energy harvester subject to vibrations induced by trains passing at different speeds. Vibration Data from two sites in the United Kingdom is used for this purpose. An approximate analytical expression for energy harvested from a linear harvester subject to a time-limited periodic excitation is evaluated using the harmonic components of the sleeper vibrations. The results are compared with those obtained through numerical analysis. Also, the behaviour of the linear energy harvester subject to vibrations induced by several passing trains is evaluated for ranges of speeds observed in measurement data sets at Steventon site