Measurements and Investigations of Helicopter-Induced Vibrations for Kinetic Energy Harvesters

Energy harvesting continues to receive increasing amounts of industrial and academic interest. In particular the attention converting the kinetic energy inherent in vibrations to electricity has gained considerable interest in energy harvesting for aircrafts and helicopters. It should be noted that several novel architectures, innovative converters and materials can be found in literature and various works focus the attention on the design, simulation, modeling and test of a specific transducer able to convert kinetic vibrations into an electrical energy. It must be observed that, very often, the signals used to validate the models, the simulations or to test an energy harvester are approximated to white noise or with some wide band waveform. It is worth noting that these hypothesized/approximated signals are far from a real scenario. In this context this paper improves the state of the art, presenting measurements and analyses of induced vibrations acquired in a helicopter. Various conditions have been considered and several investigations have been pursued in order to estimate the level of vibrations and the amount of energy that can be harvested in the considered environment. The work here conducted is of interest in order to design an energy harvester able to operate in presence of helicopter-induced vibrations, and useful to supply/sustain sensor nodes.