Efficiency of harvesting energy from colored noise by linear oscillators

We investigate the performance of a linear electromechanical oscillator as an energy harvester of finite-bandwidth random vibrations. We derive exact analytical expressions for the net electrical power and the efficiency of the conversion of the power supplied by the noise into electrical power for arbitrary colored noise. We apply our results to the important case of exponentially correlated noise and discuss the tuning of parameters to achieve good performance of the device. © 2013 American Physical Society.