Accelerated simulation of tunable vibration energy harvesting systems using a linearised state-space technique

This paper proposes a linearised state-space technique to accelerate the simulation of tunable vibration energy harvesting systems by at least two orders of magnitude. The paper provides evidence that currently available simulation tools are inadequate for simulating complete energy harvesting systems where prohibitive CPU times are encountered due to disparate time scales. In the proposed technique, the model of a complete mixed-technology energy harvesting system is divided into component blocks whose mechanical and analogue electrical parts are modelled by local state equations and terminal variables while the digital electrical part is modelled as a digital process. Unlike existing simulation tools that use Newton-Raphson method, the proposed technique uses explicit integration such as Adams-Bashforth method to solve the state equations of the complete energy harvester model in short simulation time. Experimental measurements of a practical tunable energy harvester have been carried out to validate the proposed technique.