Design of an Electromagnetic Regenerative Damper and Energy Harvesting Assessment

Design of an electromagnetic regenerative shock absorber is proposed in this paper. In order to increase the efficiency of land vehicles the sources of energy losses have to be eliminated, or reduced. For this reason, several systems, recovering kinetic energy and converting it into electrical power, were studied and designed in the last years. This energy, converted into heat in traditional systems, is recovered to increase the autonomy of the vehicle. The proposed device is constituted by a stator part which coils are placed in an innovative disposition. The moving part is constituted by a rod made in stainless steel with alternated permanent magnets and spacers, so that the relative motion generates a great variation of the concatenated magnetic flux on the coils. A damper mathematical model is implementedin order to characterize the device operating. Several finite element analyses, conducted in ANSYS Workbench Magnetostatic, have confirmed the magnetic field and flux values obtained through the theoretical analysis.