Numerical Investigation on Vortex-Induced Vibration over Circular Cylinder to be used for Energy Harvesting Application

Abstract

Renewable energy is energy generated through inexhaustible processing resources, like sunlight, wind, etc. Existing and popular wind energy harvesting technology is wind turbine farms that have very high installation costs and demand strong wind flow to deliver sufficient power. Thus, wind energy generation based on the vortex-induced vibration-based energy harvester has become a more popular field of interest for many researchers. The vortex shedding produced by the unsteady incompressible flow over a bluff body has been used to excite the piezoelectric plate, generating electricity by its vibration. Hence generating an optimised vortex shedding and obtaining the optimised oscillation frequency. This paper investigates the computational fluid dynamics-based flow analysis over a smooth cylinder carrying a plate. The Reynolds number, Re, is 100 used for unsteady incompressible flow and the plate density ratio is varied from 5 – 40. The variation in lift and drag forces and frequency of vibration, and maximum vibration amplitude achieved by the piezoelectric plate is observed and determined. The results presented here help design a better and more efficient vortex-induced energy harvester.