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Flow-induced vibration and energy harvesting of an elastically mounted circular cylinder with mechanically coupled rotation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2025

Ming Zhao
Affiliation:
School of Engineering, Design and Built Environment, Western Sydney University, Penrith, 2751, NSW, Australia
Qin Zhang*
Affiliation:
School of Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, PR China
Yong Liu*
Affiliation:
School of Engineering, Ocean University of China, Qingdao, PR China
*
Corresponding authors: Qin Zhang, zhangqin2000@ouc.edu.cn; Yong Liu, liuyong@ouc.edu.cn
Corresponding authors: Qin Zhang, zhangqin2000@ouc.edu.cn; Yong Liu, liuyong@ouc.edu.cn

Abstract

One-degree-of-freedom flow-induced vibration (FIV) and energy harvesting through FIV of an elastically mounted circular cylinder with mechanically coupled rotation were investigated numerically for low Reynolds number 100, mass ratio 8 and a wide range of reduced velocities. The aims of this study are to investigate the effect of the flow direction angle $\beta$ on the vibration and energy harvesting through FIV. Two types of lock-in are found: vortex-induced vibration (VIV) and galloping. The response amplitude increases with the increase of $\beta$ in both regimes. Both VIV response and galloping regimes are found for $\beta$ = 45° to $\beta$ = 90°. For $\beta$ = −90° to $\beta$ = 0°, only VIV response regimes are found. The fluid force and fluid torque play different roles in exciting/damping the vibration. In the high-amplitude gallop regime, the fluid force excites the vibration, and the torque damps the vibration. Energy harvesting at flow direction angle 90° is investigated as this flow direction has the maximum galloping amplitude. The energy harvesting is achieved by a linear electric damping coefficient in the numerical model. The maximum harvestable power in the galloping regime is significantly greater than that in the VIV regime, and it increases with the increase of the reduced velocity. When the reduced velocity is 20, the harvested power is over 20 times that in the VIV regime, and can further increase if reduced velocity further increases. The maximum efficiency over all simulated parameters is 0.424, occurring when the reduced velocity is 20, and electric damping factor is 0.04.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Computational domain for simulating vibration of a circular cylinder mechanically coupled with rotation using computational fluid dynamics. (a) Computational domain and (b) Velocity and force of the cylinder at $\beta$ = 90.

Figure 1

Figure 2. Comparison between the present numerical results and other numerical and experimental results at $\beta$ = 90°: (a) r = 0.32, (b) r = 0.5.

Figure 2

Table 1. Non-dimensional vibration amplitude and frequency for $\beta$ = 90° and Ur = 20.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Comparison between the vibration time histories from three difference meshes.

Figure 4

Figure 4. Variation of the vibration amplitude with the reduced velocity for Re = 100, m* = 8 and r = 0.32. (a) Global view, (b) Zoomed-in view of the lock-in range and (c) Logarithmic scale of the A-axis.

Figure 5

Figure 5. Variation of the vibration frequency with the reduced velocity. (a) Global view and Same as (b) with zoomed-in view near the Strouhal frequency.

Figure 6

Figure 6. Mapping of lock-in regimes in the $\beta$–Vr plane.

Figure 7

Figure 7. Difference between the lock-in regimes at $\beta$ = 45° and $\beta$ = −60°.

Figure 8

Figure 8. Variation of the peak amplitude in the lock-in regime with the angle of attack.

Figure 9

Figure 9. Variation of the phase difference between the vibration displacement and equivalent force $F_{e}$ with the reduced velocity.

Figure 10

Figure 10. Variation of the power by the force and the torque with the reduced velocity. (a) $\overline{E}_{F}\ \text{and}\ \overline{E}_{T}, \beta=15^{\circ}\ \text{and}\ 0^{\circ}$, (b) $\overline{E}_{F}\ \text{and}\ -\overline{E}_{T}, \beta=75^{\circ}\ \text{and}\ 90^{\circ}$ and (c) $\overline{E}_{F}\ \text{only},\ \beta=-90^{\circ}\ \text{to}\ 90^{\circ}$.

Figure 11

Figure 11. (a) Mapping of the roles of the force and the torque on the $\beta$–Vr plane. The red lines are the boundaries between zones A1, A2, B1 and B2. The coloured areas are the galloping and VIV lock-in regimes, respectively. (b) Contours of $\overline{E}_{F}$ on the $\beta$–Vr plane.

Figure 12

Figure 12. Vortex shedding in the galloping regime at $\beta$ = 75° and Vr = 20. (a) $t=603.72, X = X_{\textit{min}}$, (b) $t=607.26$, (c) $t=609.60$, (d) $t=614.82, X = X_{\textit{max}}$, (e) $t=618.60$, (f) $t=620.82$ and (g) $t=625.86, X = X_{\textit{min}}$.

Figure 13

Figure 13. The comparison between the calculated non-dimensional power with the numerical results by Soti et al. (2017) at Re = 150, m* = 2 and Vr = 4.25.

Figure 14

Figure 14. Variation of the non-dimensional power with the reduced velocity for a circular cylinder without mechanically coupled rotation at Re = 100 and m* = 8.

Figure 15

Figure 15. Time histories of the displacement X of a cylinder mechanically coupled with rotation r = 0.32 and $\zeta _{e}=0.05$.

Figure 16

Figure 16. Contributions of fluid force and fluid torque on the power generation. (a) Force contribution $\overline{E}_{F}$ and (b) Torque contribution $\overline{E}_{T}$.

Figure 17

Figure 17. (a) Contributions of $\overline{E}_{F}$ and $\overline{E}_{T}$ in energy harvesting. (b) Contours of the non-dimensional power $\overline{E}$ on the $\zeta _{e}{-}V_{r}$ plane.

Figure 18

Figure 18. Variation of the non-dimensional power with the reduced velocity for various values of $\zeta _{e}$: (a) linear scale $\overline{E}$-axis; (b) same as (a) except that the $\overline{E}$-axis uses a logarithmic scale.

Figure 19

Figure 19. Contours of efficiency on the $\zeta _{e}{-}V_{r}$ plane.