A novel variable damper using an adjustable energy harvesting structure is proposed for semi-active vibration systems. The fluid flowing in a hydraulic cylinder is employed to drive an electromagnetic generator for harvesting vibration energy, which on the other hand, leads to a damping effect of the hydraulic damper. To make the damping force variable, an adjustable resistor is adopted to tune the capability of energy harvesting. The present approach is validated by both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation. When connected with different resistance loads, the prototype damper has different equivalent damping coefficients ranging from 3. 987 × 104 to 2. 488 × 105 N· s/m. The results show that the damping force of the damper is variable in response to the adjustable load for the vibration energy harvesting.
The dynamic behavior of the stranded wire helical spring is described by a modified Bouc-Wen model while the model parameters must be identified using an identification method and experimental data. Existing identification methods usually relies either solely nonlinear iterative algorithms or manually trial and error. Therefore, the identification process can be rather time consuming and effort taking. As a result, these methods are not ideal for engineering applications. To come up with a more practical method, a three-stage identification method is proposed. Periodic loading and identification simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Noises are added to the simulated data to test the performance of the proposed method when dealing with noise contaminated data. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method is able to give satisfying results when the noise levels are set to be 0.01, 0.03, 0.05 and 0.07. In addition, the proposed method is also applied to experimental data and compared with an existing method. The experimental data is acquired through a periodic loading test. The experiment results suggest that the proposed method features better accuracy compared with the existing method. An effective approach is proposed for identifying the model parameters of the stranded wire helical spring.
