Investigation of an energy harvesting MR damper in a vibration control system

In this paper the authors investigate the performance of an energy harvesting MR damper (EH-MRD) employed in a semi-active vibration control system (SVCS) and used in a single DOF mechanical structure configuration. Main components of the newly proposed SCVS include the MR damper and an electromagnetic vibration energy harvester based on the Faraday's law (EVEH) that converts vibration energy into electrical energy and delivers electrical power supplying the MR damper. The main objective of the study is to indicate that the SVCS, controlled by the specially designed embedded system, is feasible and presents good performance at the present stage of the research. The work describes investigation the unique features of the EH-MRD, i.e. its self-powering and self-sensing capabilities. Two cases were considered and the testing was done accordingly. In the case 1, only the self-powered capability was investigated. It was found out that harvested energy is sufficient to power the EH-MRD damper and to adjust it to structural vibration. The results confirmed the adequacy of the SVCS and demonstrated a significant reduction of the resonance peak. In the case 2, both the self-powering and self-sensing capabilities were investigated. Due to the self-sensing capability, the SCVS does not require any sensor. It appeared that thus harvested energy is sufficient to power the EH-MRD and enables self-sensing action since the signal of voltage induced by EVEH agrees with the relative velocity signal across the device. Similar to case 1, the resonance peak is significantly reduced.