Abstract
To prevent the global warming, it is desired to develop eco-friendly electricity generation technology. For this sake, various types of generation technology utilizing renewable energy, such as wind power and solar power, have been already developed and are in operation. But the amounts of electric power generated by these technologies are smaller than those by thermal power or nuclear power plants. Thus it is important to increase the diversity of the electricity generating methods. In this study, fluid-elastic vibration of tubes subjected to cross flow will be utilized. This vibration sometimes causes the failure of tubes in the heat exchangers such as a boiler and a steam generator, and conventional researches focus on the methods to suppress this vibration. But if we focus on this vibration from the other aspect, this vibration has very large energy, because tubes take in fluid energy very efficiently. Therefore, we propose a new method to generate electricity from fluid-elastic vibration of tubes. Here, we fabricate a fundamental flow-induced vibration model of tubes and investigate the possibility to harvest energy and to generate electricity from fluid-elastic vibration. We employ electromagnetic induction as electric power generating.
