Vibration Energy Harvesting of a Hydraulic Engine Mount Using a Turbine

The hydraulic engine mount (HEM) has been designed to provide a vibration isolation characteristic to control road and engine induced vibrations in vehicles by using two fluid passages known as decoupler and inertia track. These types of engine mounts are known for their best noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) suppression performance among other different types of engine mounts. However, a low cost technique to recycle the dissipated energy of the system in the process of vibration suppression is significantly advantageous. A novel design structure in which the decoupler is replaced with a water turbine to capture and restore the vibration energy of the system is presented in this paper. The turbine design and selection has been done based on the upper and lower chamber pressures and the fluid flow rates in the system’s resonant frequency. The mount vibration isolation and energy generation performance is studied in both frequency and time domains. The simulation results demonstrate that a considerable amount of energy can be harvested from the engine vibration sources. This recent study demonstrates a novel energy harvesting technique in vehicles that require minimum design modifications of conventional hydraulic mounts.Copyright © 2010 by ASME