A Methodology to Design Linear Generators for Energy Conversion of Ambient Vibrations

An air-cored tubular linear generator is designed and prototyped, to capture transient bridge vibrations to power wireless sensors on a bridge. The relationship between the moving mass, the spring, and the damping for harvesting sufficient vibration energy is developed. The voltage and power of the linear generator with sinusoidal speed are obtained with a transient electromagnetic field analysis. Finally, the ambient experimental results of the linear generator are obtained and analyzed from actual bridge vibrations.