A Magnetostrictive Energy Harvester for Shipboard Mechanical Vibration Sources

There are many efforts underway to develop distributed shipboard health monitoring sensors. These devices face strong opposition by fleet maintainers unless the requirements for power supply cabling and/or battery maintenance are eliminated. Consequently, methods for harvesting energy from local environmental conditions using heat, solar, and vibration are of great interest. As opposed to piezoelectric and electromagnetic energy harvesting devices which tend to be either fragile or large and inefficient, magnetostrictive energy harvesting devices offer reliability, excellent conversion efficiency, and low cost. We propose to determine the feasibility of developing a magnetostrictive energy harvesting device for shipboard distributed health monitoring sensors using vibration as the energy input. During Phase I, we will develop the concept described in this proposal and build and evaluate a prototype. During Phase II, we will fabricate several prototype systems and demonstrate performance on large scale platforms.