This paper investigates employing a nonlinear restoring force to improve the performance of flow energy harvesters (FEHs). To that end, a galloping FEH possessing a quartic potential energy function of the form V ¼ 1 2 ly 2 þ 1 4 cy 4 is considered. This potential function is used to model either a softening (l > 0, c < 0), hardening (l > 0, c > 0), or bi-stable (l < 0, c > 0) restoring force. A physics-based model of the harvester is obtained assuming piezoelectric transduction and a quasi-steady flow field. The model is validated against experimental data and used to obtain a closed-form solution of the response by employing a multiple scaling perturbation analysis using the Jacobi elliptic functions. The attained solution is subsequently used to investigate the influence of the nonlinearity on the performance of the harvester and to illustrate how to optimize the restoring force in order to maximize the output power for given design conditions and airflow parameters. Specifically, it is shown that for similar design parameters and equal magnitudes of l, and c, a bi-stable energy harvester outperforms all other configurations as long as the inter-well motions are activated. On the other hand, if the motion of the bi-stable harvester is limited to a single well, then a harvester incorporating a softening nonlinear restoring force outperforms all other configurations. Furthermore, when comparing two FEHs incorporating the same type of restoring force at the optimal load and similar values of l, then the FEH with the smaller c is shown to provide higher output power levels. V C 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.

Linear wake-galloping flow energy harvesters have a narrow frequency bandwidth restricted to the lock-in region, where the vortex shedding frequency is close to the natural frequency of the harvester. As a result, their performance is very sensitive to variations in the flow speed around the nominal design value. This letter demonstrates that the lock-in region of a wake-galloping flow energy harvester can be improved by exploiting a bi-stable restoring force. To demonstrate the enhanced performance, the response behavior of a bi-stable piezoelectric cantilever harvester is evaluated in a wind tunnel. A Von Kármán vortex street is generated by placing a rectangular rod in the windward direction of the harvester and the voltage response of the harvester is evaluated as a function of the wind speed. It is shown that, compared to the linear design, bi-stability can be used to improve the steady-state bandwidth considerably.

Emergence of increasingly smaller electromechanical systems with submilli-Watt power consumption led to the development of scalable micropower generators (MPGs) that harness ambient energy to provide electrical power on a very small scale. A flow MPG is one particular type which converts the momentum of an incident flow into electrical output. Traditionally, flow energy is harnessed using rotary-type generators whose performance has been shown to drop as their size decreases. To overcome this issue, oscillating flow MPGs were proposed. Unlike rotary-type generators which rely upon a constant aerodynamic force to produce a deflection or rotation, oscillating flow MPGs take advantage of cross-flow instabilities to provide a periodic forcing which can be used to transform the momentum of the moving fluid into mechanical motion. The mechanical motion is then transformed into electricity using an electromechanical transduction element. The purpose of this review article is to summarize important research carried out during the past decade on flow micropower generation using cross-flow instabilities. The summarized research is categorized according to the different instabilities used to excite mechanical motion: galloping, flutter, vortex shedding, and wake-galloping. Under each category, the fundamental mechanism responsible for the instability is explained, and the basic mathematical equations governing the motion of the generator are presented. The main design parameters affecting the performance of the generator are identified, and the pros and cons of each method are highlighted. Possible directions of future research which could help to improve the efficacy of flow MPGs are also discussed.

Galloping is an aeroelastic instability which incites oscillatory motion of elastic structures when subjected to an incident flow. Because galloping is often detrimental to the integrity of the structure, many research studies have focused on investigating methodologies to suppress these oscillations. These include using passive energy sinks, altering the surface characteristics of the structure, actively changing the shape of the boundary layer through momentum injection and using feedback control algorithms. In this paper, we demonstrate that the critical flow speed at which galloping is activated can be substantially increased by subjecting the galloping structure to a high-frequency non-resonant base excitation. The average effect of the high-frequency excitation is to produce additional linear damping in the slow response which serves to suppress the galloping instability. We study this approach theoretically and demonstrate its effectiveness using experimental tests performed on a galloping cantilevered structure. It is demonstrated that the galloping speed can be tripled in some experimental cases. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Vibrational and stochastic resonance in driven nonlinear systems (part 2)’.

No abstract