Cyber-physical Energy Harvesting through Flow-Induced Oscillations of a Rectangular Plate

The dynamics of a flat plate undergoing flow-induced oscillations in a uniform airflow have been investigated experimentally using a cyber-physical system, which integrates a real-time feedback control algorithm to simulate the desired structural dynamics. The feedback control scheme utilizes the angular position and velocity measurements as inputs to the virtual system to numerically simulate the dynamics of an elastically mounted flat plate on a virtual spring-damper system. A series of experiments were conducted using two different sized rectangular plates (AR=3.5 and 5.3), and over a range of free-stream velocities (10 m/s ∼ 25 m/s), and simulated stiffness (0<k∗ v<1.5) and damping (0.01<bv<0.56), where the non-dimensionalization is based on inertial fluid characteristics. The Reynolds number, based on the chord length of the plates, were in the order of O(10) to O(10). In this paper, we demonstrate our cyber-physical system’s robust capability to simulate the effects of varying torsional spring stiffness and linear damping, confirm that inertial scalings of the system stiffness and damping are appropriate, and quantify the system’s modest abilities to harvest energy from a steady airflow.