Investgation of Wake Effects in Aeroelastic Flutter Vibration Energy Harvesting

This paper examines a novel energy harvesting device for powering wireless sensors or other low power electronics by extracting energy from an ambient fluid flow. In particular, a simple device driven by aeroelastic flutter vibrations has been designed to extract vibratory energy from the flow and then transduce these vibrations to electrical current via cyclically straining piezoelectric patches. This energy harvester is driven by aeroelastic flutter vibrations of a two degree of freedom structure that grow in amplitude until steady limit cycle oscillation is reached. One application for such as system is using multiple devices simultaneously to create a “wind panel” system that could be used in areas where traditional wind turbines are impractical. Successful design of such a system will require consideration of the downstream wake effects of multiple energy harvesters operating in close proximity. Preliminary wind tunnel studies investigating these effects on the steady state power output of several aeroelastic energy harvesting devices arranged in multiple configurations are presented and analyzed.