Low frequency mechanical vibrations are ubiquitous in practical environments, and how to efficiently harvest them with piezoelectric materials remains a challenge. Frequency up-conversion strategies-up-converting low frequency vibrations to high frequency self-oscillations-can improve the power density of piezoelectric materials. This paper mainly introduces a kind of frequency which up-converts piezoelectric energy harvesters based on an internal resonance mechanism, compared with the other mechanisms caused by mechanical impact, mechanical plucking, etc.; the internal resonance-based harvesters can up-convert the frequency under a condition of lower excitation level, less energy loss, and less wideband operation bandwidth. Benefits to practical vibrations also exist in these multi-degree-of-freedom nonlinear dynamic systems. Moreover, the value of the frequency up-conversion factor based on the 1:2:6 internal resonance mechanism can reach as much as six so far, which is also a quite a high frequency up-conversion value.
Keywords: frequency up-conversion; internal resonance; low frequency; piezoelectric; vibration energy harvesting.