Concurrent wind and base vibration energy harvesting with a broadband bistable aeroelastic energy harvester

Abstract

This paper presents a novel energy harvesting device driven by concurrent aeroelastic vibration and base vibratory excitation. The harvester undergoes flow-induced limit-cycle oscillation under galloping instability, and at the same time, inertia force induced vibration is present due to the base vibratory excitation. A limitation with a traditional linear aeroelastic energy harvester is that effective energy harvesting from combined sources is only achievable within a narrow frequency range. To overcome this issue, bistability is introduced by exploiting nonlinear restoring force. A lumped aero-electro-mechanical model is established to incorporate the mutual coupling between the wind flow, piezoelectric element, nonlinear structure and circuit. Dynamic responses are investigated for different bistable configurations. Results show that the proposed harvester achieves a significantly widened bandwidth over which the two excitation frequencies are forced to lock into each other, and both vibratory and aeroelastic energy are effectively harnessed.