Abstract

This talk presents about research on harvesting energy from railway-slab tracks. Energy can be harvested by converting the mechanical energy resulting from vibration of tracks to electrical energy. The energy can then be used for a number of applications including powering of sensors for health-monitoring of tracks. In this research, a railway slab-track is simulated by using double Euler-Bernoulli beam system. The parameters of the track are calculated from a model-updating exercise of a mock-up track for Doha metro. Vibration of the track is modelled by accounting for both the quasi-static and dynamic excitations resulting from the un-sprung axles of a train with a number of coaches; simulating a standard train with the same parameters of trains of Doha metro. The dynamic excitation is simulated by using randomly-generated unevenness from standard Power Spectral Density (PSD) from the literature. The responses of rails and slab are calculated for different unevenness realizations, and results are transformed in the frequency domain and used as inputs for a base-excited SDOF system to simulate the coupling of harvesters to rails and slab. The presentation will present results of the simulations showing the variation of harvested energy when changing their natural frequencies for unevenness corresponding to tracks in good, average, and poor conditions.