Different from the traditional wind turbine technology, wind-induced vibration energy harvesting technologies could efficiently harvest energy from weak wind, and potentially solve the challenging issue of power supply for wireless sensors and low-powered devices used in special application environment (such as remote area, mountainous area, etc.). As one of the wind-induced vibration energy harvesting technologies, flutter-based wind energy harvesting technology has received a lot of attention from researchers. It can be a potential alternative to traditional batteries and has become a research hotspot in recent years.

  Mr. Zhiyuan Li, Prof. Shengxi Zhou and Prof. Zhichun Yang at School of Aeronautics in Northwestern Polytechnical University jointly presented a review entitled “Recent progress on flutter-based wind energy harvesting”, which was published in the International Journal of Mechanical System Dynamics (IJMSD) in 2022. Recent researches on three types of flutter-based energy harvesters (FEHs) including airfoil-based, flat plate-based, and flexible body-based FEHs are reviewed, and related concepts and theoretical models are introduced. The recent progress in FEH performance enhancement methods is classified into structural improvement and optimization, introduction of nonlinearity, and hybrid structures and mechanisms. Finally, the main FEH challenges are summarized, and future research directions are discussed.