Optimal Energy Harvesting From Vortex-Induced Vibrations of Cables

Abstract

We propose to use flexible cables instead of rigid rods in devices extracting energy from Vortex-Induced Vibrations (VIVs). We use a linear equation of motion for the structure coupled with a nonlinear wake oscillator and numerical tools to simulate the VIVs of hanging strings/cables. While extracting energy from the VIVs of a straight cable with a harvester attached to one of its ends is as efficient as extracting energy from the VIVs of rigid structures, we find that the former is much more robust to flow fluctuations than the latter. We finally show that those results carry over to more complex geometries (e.g. catenary).