Energy Harvesting from Axial Flow Induced Instabilities in Slender Structures

In this work we examine the prospects for harvesting energy from flutter instabilities of a slender, flexible cylinder in an axial flow stream. We couple the fluid-solid model and include energy harvesting as curvature based damping. In the first instance we model the reduced order system comprising of an articulated rigid cylinder pair with discrete springs and dampers and demonstrate the scope for harvesting energy from flutter instabilities. Extending the study to a continuously varying system confirms the scope for energy harvesting. The numerical models are employed to find the optimal damping distributions and we see that the two configurations give very different results. We examine the subtle differences between the two apparently canonical configurations that lead to these differing optimals.