1. Vortex Energy
Energy Harvesting from natural flows
Clean | Efficient | Powerful
Lavish Ordia Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay 1
Lavish Ordia
A. Venugopal
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
IIT Bombay

2. Wonder Why so?
Fluttering of flag
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INDIA

3. Lavish Ordia Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay 3
Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse
Washington, 1940

4. Vortex Shedding
Oscillating periodic flow that takes place when a fluid
flows past a body
At certain velocities, depending on the size and shape of
the body
Eg. Fluttering of Handkerchief, leaves of trees; swaying
of trees and many more.
Lavish Ordia Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay 4
Reference : Wikipedia

5. Ocean Current Map
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6. Vortex Shedding
• What if this could be used in a positive way?
• Enhancing this oscillations to generate energy
• Potential : Can meet 10% energy needs of US
• More than 50% of the U.S. population lives and works within
50 miles of the coastline
• Clean, Renewable, Powerful energy
• No turbines, propellers, or dams
• More powerful in water, smaller scale model can be used in
air
• Can substitute windmills
World’s oceans contain an astounding amount of energy in the form
of waves, currents, tidal flows and temperature gradients
Lavish Ordia Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay 6

7. Impact!!
• Current World Wide Electricity generation
16,000 TWh
• The total accessible market, near population centers, is
estimated at 4,000 TWh
Is it so clean???
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8. Schematic of Energy generation
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9. Demo | Video
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10. Principle | Outline
• Three way coupling of energy
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11. Another design
Lavish Ordia Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Bombay 11
Use of Piezoelectric materials

12. Advantages
• Easy to set up
(compared to dams, wind mills, solar cells etc.)
• Less maintenance
• High energy density
• Low cost
• Renewable, no green house gas emissions
A lot of research required for commercialization
And optimizing the performance
May take more than a decade to come into practice
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13. Thank You!

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