Enhancing energy harvesting by coupling monostable oscillators
  The performance of a ring of linearly coupled, monostable nonlinear oscillators is optimized towards its goal of acting as energy harvester---through piezoelectric transduction---of mesoscopic fluctuations, which are modeled as Ornstein--Uhlenbeck noises. For a single oscillator, the maximum output voltage and overall efficiency are attained for a soft piecewise-linear potential (providing a weak attractive constant force) but they are still fairly large for a harmonic potential. When several harmonic springs are linearly and bidirectionally coupled to form a ring, it is found that counter-phase coupling can largely improve the performance while in-phase coupling worsens it. Moreover, it turns out that few (two or three) coupled units perform better than more. 
J.I. Pena Rossello (IIFMdP, Arg.), H.S. Wio (IFCA, Spain), R.R. Deza   (IIFMdP, Arg.) and P. Hanggi (Augsburg U., Germany)
nlin.PS cond-mat.stat-mech physics.comp-ph