01657379

Component

The goal of this study was to develop a prototype for harvesting railroad vibration energy as a train passed by. This technologies contribute to powering the rail-side devices for railroad condition monitoring in off-grid, remote areas. However, the state-of-the-art of energy harvesting does not fit the requirement of railroad, which has the vibration characteristics of small displacement amplitudes over a wider range of frequencies. This paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental verification of a rail-mounted non-linear oscillator by magnetic levitation. The dynamic modeling of the magnetic levitation oscillator was presented to analyze its response characteristics. The results indicate that the non-linear stiffness characteristics of magnetic levitation oscillation can be utilized to realize the broad-band energy harvesting; and the device parameters (i.e., numbers of turn, coil geometry and arrangement, surface magnetic flux density, etc.) can be adjusted to fit the requirement of small displacement amplitudes. The performance of the proposed prototype was evaluated by experimental tests, and the results show that a usable voltage output of 1.36 V to 6.96 V can be obtained over a wide frequency range from 7 Hz to 500 Hz. One application scenario was revealed at the end of this paper: it used the proposed prototype as a local energy source for powering the sensor nodes of a Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN).

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC60 Standing Committee on Resource Conservation and Recovery.

18-00127

English

5p

2018

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Tables

Energy consumption; Magnetic levitation; Oscillation; Railroads; Vibration

Energy; Railroads

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-00127

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 8 2018 10:03AM