Abstract
An innovative water current energy converter utilizing the flow-induced vibration of a columnar pendulum has been developed. In this study, a new type of converter exploiting the galloping oscillation induced in a semi-circular or a semi-elliptical cylinder pendulum is proposed instead of using the vortex-induced oscillation of a circular cylinder pendulum. This new converter with a semi-circular cylinder pendulum achieved five times higher performance in energy harvesting efficiency than a circular cylinder pendulum. Moreover a semi-elliptical cylinder pendulum achieved twice the performance of the semi-circular cylinder pendulum. Nondimensional power of a semi-elliptical cylinder pendulum increased linearly with nondimensional flow velocity along the one regression line independently of the pendulum length in the low flow velocity range. On the other hand, the nondimensional power of a semi-elliptical cylinder pendulum was approximately constant with nondimensional flow velocity in the high flow velocity range.
