The demand for developing renewable energy technologies has been growing in today\u27s society. As one of promising renewable energy sources, large-scale energy harvesting from structural vibrations employing electromagnetic transducers has recently been proposed and considerable effort has been devoted to increase the power generation capability. In this paper, we introduce the mechanism of a tuned inertial mass electromagnetic transducer (TIMET), which can absorb vibratory energy more efficiently by tuning the parameters to adjust the system. Then we propose a new vibratory energy harvester with the TIMET and determine the parameter values for the device with a simple static admittance (SA) control law to maximize the energy harvested from a stationary stochastic disturbance. To investigate the energy harvesting potential of the TIMET further, the performance-guaranteed (PG) control and the LQG control proposed in the literature are applied as well. Then the numerical simulation studies are carried out and the effectiveness of the proposed energy harvester is examined by comparing the traditional electromagnetic transducers

Quasi-zero-stiffness (QZS) vibration isolators avoid excessive deformation due to gravity, a critical issue in vertical vibration isolation, by providing restoring force with high initial stiffness and low tangent stiffness around the static equilibrium position. Effective use of geometric nonlinearity often plays a central role in QZS mechanisms. Design of such QZS mechanisms, however, tends to be complex, and it is difficult to realize large loading capacity as well as large stroke length at the same time. This paper attempts to resolve these issues by applying newly developed superelastic Cu–Al–Mn shape memory alloy (SMA) bars, characterized by excellent recoverable strain upon unloading along with small hysteresis and nearly flat stress plateau. These features are realized by material design tailored for obtaining mechanical properties required in QZS mechanisms. The use of such tailored superelastic Cu–Al–Mn SMA bars allows us to easily achieve large loading capacity as well as large stroke length while keeping the QZS mechanism simple and compact. In this paper, we derive design equations, produce a prototype, and conduct shaking table tests and numerical simulations to demonstrate the feasibility of QZS vibration isolator with superelastic Cu–Al–Mn SMA bars