Modeling and performance analysis of electromagnetic energy harvester based on torsional galloping phenomenon

Abstract

A novel torsional galloping energy harvester is proposed herein. Despite the high potential of energy harvesters based on torsional galloping, several difficulties have hindered their modeling, analysis, and development for use in practical cases. To circumvent such difficulties, thorough theoretical and experimental studies of the proposed energy harvester are conducted. The extended Hamilton principle is employed, and a complex modal analysis is performed, along with the process of transformation from the non-self-adjoint to self-adjoint system by using a couple of special techniques. The Galerkin method and a perturbation method are used to discretize and analyze the associated nonlinear autonomous system of equations. By using the results of theoretical analysis, the configuration of the torsional galloping energy harvester is determined, and our main experiment is conducted thereafter. The results of a direct numerical simulation and semi-analytic perturbation are compared to the experimental results, and good agreement is obtained between these sets of results. We believe that the present study can serve as a good milestone for research and development on various forms of torsional-galloping-based energy harvesters.