Performance enhancement of a viscoelastic bistable energy harvester using time-delayed feedback control

Abstract This paper focuses on the stochastic analysis of a viscoelastic bistable energy harvesting system under colored noise and harmonic excitation, and adopts the time-delayed feedback control to improve its harvesting efficiency. Firstly, to obtain the dimensionless governing equation of the system, the original bistable system is approximated as a system without viscoelastic term by using the stochastic averaging method of energy envelope, and then is further decoupled to derive an equivalent system. The credibility of the proposed method is validated by contrasting the consistency between the numerical and the analytical results of the equivalent system under different noise conditions. The influence of system parameters on average output power is analyzed, and the control effect of the time-delayed feedback control on system performance is compared. The output performance of the system is improved with the occurrence of stochastic resonance (SR). Therefore, the signal-to-noise ratio expression for measuring SR is derived, and the dependence of its SR behavior on different parameters is explored.