Volume 24: Sustainable Energy Solutions for a Post-COVID Recovery towards a Better Future: Part VII

Piezoelectric Wind Energy Harvesting by Vortex Induced Vibration of a Flexible Cylindrical Cantilever Shell Chisuzu Oda, Tsutomu Nishigaki*

Abstract

This paper proposed a piezoelectric wind energy harvesting method by vortex induced vibration (VIV) of axial bending vibrations of a flexible cylindrical cantilever shell. In the past decade, wind energy harvesting method by piezoelectric devices had been widely studied for alternative approach to the conventional wind turbines toward supplying power sources for ultra-low power electric devices which will be used for remote monitoring of large-scale structures. However, most of them were based on the combination of a rigid bluff body (BB) cylinder and a cantilever beam which contains piezoelectric element, and had problems of low power generation and durability against repeated loading. In the authors’ previous reports, a new Piezoelectric Cylindrical Shell Wind Energy Harvesting Flag (PCSWEHF) had been proposed as a flexible and durable power generation structure that utilizes VIV and power generation performance by circumferential bending motion of side-supported shell harvester was experimentally verified. In this study, we experimentally investigated the cantilever-type flexible structure based on the PCSWEHF by using prototypes with different parameters: the cross-sectional area of the cylindrical shell is constant, and the outer and inner radii of the shell are varied.

Keywords Wind energy, energy harvesting, piezoelectric film, cylindrical shell