Multidirectional galloping-based wind energy harvester based on a cylindrical cantilever beam and multi-tooth blunt body

Abstract

Abstract To improve the response-ability of the energy harvester to multi-directional wind, this paper proposes a galloping-based wind energy harvester by fixing a multi-tooth blunt body at the free end of a cylindrical cantilever beam, which consists of a long-straight FeGa thin cylinder and a piezoelectric tube. Combining the structural symmetry advantages of the multi-tooth blunt body and piezoelectric cylinder cantilever, the harvester can respond well to the wind from all directions of the two-dimensional plane. In the simulation and experiment, detailed comparative studies are carried out on the harvesters with square (four-tooth), six-tooth, eight-tooth, ten-tooth, and twelve-tooth blunt bodies. Within the wind speed range of 1.5 ∼ 8 m s−1, the results show that the harvester with a six-tooth blunt body has the best multidirectional wind response performance. When the wind speed is 8 m s−1, the output power of the harvester with a six-tooth blunt body improves by ∼43% more than that of the harvester with a traditional square blunt body. The design idea of the proposed harvester provides a direction for the future in-depth study of multidirectional piezoelectric wind energy harvesting.