Energy Harvesting Shock Absorber with Linear Generator and Mechanical Motion Amplification

Energy harvesting shock absorbers can generate about 15-20 W of electric power for normal suspension velocities. However, higher weight, fail safe characteristics and space limitations have restricted development of regenerative shock absorbers to research prototypes. Power to weight ratio of regenerative shock absorbers can be improved by incorporating motion amplification. In the presented work, an innovative design of energy harvesting shock absorber has been presented that uses motion amplification for improving harvesting efficiency. Apart from improving electric power, the proposed solution is fail safe and can be easily incorporated in existing vehicles with only marginal change in suspension layout. Study includes detailed numerical analysis for vibration transmissibility to investigate comfort and safety. Further, a prototype has been fabricated and experimentation has been performed to compute electric power generated and comfort. Simulations have been performed on real size model with utilization of harvested electric power which indicates about 19% of overall harvesting efficiency.