A student project for AHSE1500: Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship (taught in Spring 2006) featuring an Olin College themed tradable card game. It consists of cards of students, professors, locations, and events.
This record contains the Final Report for the project and scanned images of all the cards in the game.
Harvesting energy from ambient vibration is a promising method for providing a continuous source of power for wireless sensor nodes. However, traditional energy harvesters are often derived from resonant linear oscillators which are capable of providing sufficient output power only if the dominant frequency of input vibrations closely matches the device resonant frequency. The limited scope of such devices has sparked an interest in the use of nonlinear oscillators as mechanisms for broadband energy harvesting. In this study, we investigate the harvesting performance of an electromagnetic harvester sustaining oscillations through the phenomena of magnetic levitation. The nonlinear behavior of the device is effectively modeled by Duffing’s equation, and direct numerical integration confirms the broadband frequency response of the nonlinear harvester. The nonlinear harvester’s power generation capabilities are directly compared to a linear electromagnetic harvester with similar dynamic parameters. Experimental testing shows that the presence of both high and low amplitude solutions for the nonlinear energy harvester results in a tendency for the oscillator to remain in a low energy state for non-harmonic vibration inputs, unless continuous energy impulses are provided. We conclude by considering future applications and improvements for such nonlinear devices.
The Olin Raytheon/WHOI SCOPE team is assisting WHOI in the buoy design effort by writing software tools for managing the energy budget of a deployed buoy. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) scientists are constructing buoys for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), an NSF funded program that will construct a network of buoys for monitoring physical, chemical, geological, and biological variables in the ocean and on the sea floor. The buoys in development for the OOI by WHOI will be expected to operate for 25 years with annual maintenance. Power for an array of reprogrammable sensors will be dependent on a combination of solar and wind power generation and an on-board fuel cell replenished during the annual maintenance.