On Integration of Vibration Suppression and Energy Harvesting Through Piezoelectric Shunting With Negative Capacitance

While negative capacitance (NC) element has the potential of increasing the apparent electro-mechanical coupling in various piezoelectric applications, it generally requires a power supply which may negate its benefit. Indeed, there has been no systematic analysis of NC power consumption in piezoelectric circuitry. In this article, we investigate the combinatorial effect of NC circuit on an integrated design of passive vibration suppression and energy harvesting with LC resonant shunt. We first conduct a power consumption analysis of a representative NC circuit and analyze its influence on piezoelectric energy harvesting. We then explore the tradeoff between vibration suppression through LC shunt with NC element and the net power generation of the energy harvester. It is identified that there exists a range of NC values within which the vibration suppression performance is enhanced while the net power generation remains to be positive. This effectively yields a self-sustainable vibration suppression enhancement scheme with an NC element. Correlated numerical and experimental studies confirm this new finding.