The increasing worldwide efforts in securing renewable energy sources have increased incentives for civil engineers to investigate whether the kinetic energy associated with the vibration of large-scale structures can be harvested. Such a research area remains challenging and incomplete, despite hundreds of related articles being published in the last decade. Base isolation is one of the most popular means of protecting a civil engineering structure against earthquake forces. Seismic isolation hinges on the decoupling of the structure from the shaking ground, hence protecting the structure from stress and damage during earthquake excitation. A low stiffness isolator inserted between the structure and the ground dominates the response leading to a structural system of longer vi...[ Read more ]

The increasing worldwide efforts in securing renewable energy sources have increased incentives for civil engineers to investigate whether the kinetic energy associated with the vibration of large-scale structures can be harvested. Such a research area remains challenging and incomplete, despite hundreds of related articles being published in the last decade. Base isolation is one of the most popular means of protecting a civil engineering structure against earthquake forces. Seismic isolation hinges on the decoupling of the structure from the shaking ground, hence protecting the structure from stress and damage during earthquake excitation. A low stiffness isolator inserted between the structure and the ground dominates the response leading to a structural system of longer vibration period. As a consequence of this period shift, the spectral acceleration is reduced, but higher response displacements are produced. To mitigate this side-effect, isolators are usually combined with the use of additional energy dissipationIn this study, the feasibility of scavenging the need-to-be dissipated energy from an isolator installed in a seismically isolated bridge using an electromagnetic (EM) energy harvester is investigated. The EM energy harvester consists of an energy harvesting circuit and a capacitor for energy storage. A mathematical model for this proposed EM energy harvester is developed and implemented on an idealized base-isolated single-degree-of-freedom system. The effect of the dimensionless electromagnetic damping value ( Π_c), the dimensionless yield displacement ( Π_uy) and the characteristic strength ( Π_Q ) on the mean value of the maximum response displacement, Π_u , the maximum harvested power, Π_PH , the average harvested power,Π_PA, and the maximum total force, Π_Ffor the pulse-type excitations, as well as the three types of earthquake records (probability of exceedance of 2% in 50 years, probability of exceedance of 10% in 50 years and probability of exceedance of 50% in 50 years) have been analyzed and discussed. The proposed method to determine the optimal value for the EM harvester, which could get the maximum harvested power as well as maintain the performance of the whole system, is also addressed.