Date of Award
Spring 2025
Document Type
Thesis
Terms of Use
© 2025 Jacob Sherman. This work is freely available courtesy of the author. It may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licensee. For all other uses, please contact the copyright holder.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Engineering Department
First Advisor
Emad Masroor
Second Advisor
E. Carr Everbach
Abstract
When a cylindrical object is placed in a moving fluid of sufficiently high Reynolds number, vortices will form and be shed in the wake of the object. Vortex-Induced Vibrations (VIV) will occur on the cylinder when the frequency at which vortices are shed approached the natural frequency of the structure. Harvesting energy on a small scale from VIV is a promising new method of generating electricity from fluid motion, but more data is needed to investigate the parameter space for such a system [4]. The goal of this E90 project was to design and implement a robust system that could efficiently collect time versus displacement data and accurately characterize the VIV response of an elastically mounted cylinder. The prototype described in this report successfully gathered data on VIV in Swarthmore College’s open circuit wind tunnel and paves the way for future studies to find the best system properties for electricity generation.
Recommended Citation
Sherman, Jacob , '25, "Building a New System to Advance Vortex-Induced Vibration Energy Harvesting" (2025). Senior Theses, Projects, and Awards. 970.
https://works.swarthmore.edu/theses/970