Energy Harvesting Through Pendulum System

The need to search for new alternative energy sources has been getting stronger in recent decades. The ocean waters despite being main solar energy collectors on earth, still remain a highly unexplored energy source. Currently there exist number of different technologies based on utilizing tides, oceans thermal energy and wave energy, most of them using the oscillatory motion of the device to capture the energy of the sea.

The motivation of this project is to make use of the rotational motion of the parametric pendulum mounted on a floating structure and excited by the waves to extract the energy from the sea.

The main advantage of this method lies in using the energy of rotations instead of oscillations, which presents a more efficient alternative due to lower energy loses and higher rotational speeds. To increase the stability of the structure a system consisting of two countertrading pendulums is being considered. The scope of the current research on this subject includes studying the dynamics of the parametric pendulums system numerically and experimentally, with the focus on their mutual interactions and synchronization phenomenon. In experiments the system is excited by an electromagnetic shaker, approximating the motion of the sea waves.