Towards control of cross-flow-induced vibrations based on energy harvesting

The active control approach generally requires power input to suppress vibrations of structures, while the conventional passive manner often causes waste of energy after transferring vibrations of the primary structure to the auxiliary system. In this work, an innovative control strategy based on energy harvesting for efficiently suppressing the cross-flow-induced vibrations such as galloping is proposed. The novel design facilitates the harvester of not only alleviating the oscillation of the primary structure but also seizing the transferred vibrational energy. An analytical model for the coupled nonlinear dynamical system is established by utilizing the Euler-Lagrange principle and implementing the Galerkin discretization. The impacts of the electrical load resistance and tip mass of the energy harvester on the coupled frequency, damping, and the onset speed of instability of the coupled multi-mode system are investigated in details. The results show that there exists an optimal load resistance for each tip mass which maximizes the onset speed of galloping. For control purposes, it is found that there is a well-defined tip mass of the energy harvester at which the coupled system has the highest onset speed of instability, and hence, the bluff body has the lowest vibration amplitude for all considered load resistances. However, to efficiently harvest energy and control the bluff body, both the tip mass of the energy harvester and electrical load resistance can be accurately determined.