Research and design of underwater flow-induced vibration energy harvester based on Karman vortex street

With the increasing development of wireless sensor network (WSN), power supply for WSN nodes had attracted increasing attention, and the energy harvesting system based on Karman vortex street has been widely used in underwater WSN. But the research of the influences of affecting factors towards the energy harvesting system is yet to be completed. So, in this paper, an underwater flow-induced vibration energy harvesting system based on Karman vortex street was proposed and tested. The influence of bluff body geometry and flow velocity towards the performance of the energy harvesting has been researched. The results showed that the output voltage increased as the diameter of bluff body and the water velocity increase. The power generation efficiency was the best when the shape of bluff body was circular.