Progress on development of a lab-scale flapping-type tidal energy harvesting system in KIOST

A flapping-type turbine extracts power from the kinetic energy of water stream by heaving up and down. A nose-up pitch angle will create an upstroke motion of the flapping arm and vice versa for nose-down pitch. These upstroke and downstroke motion will then be converted into a continuous rotary motion of an output shaft by a transmission system. In this work, we describe our current progress on the development of design and prototype implementation of a flapping-type tidal energy harvester and introduce the dynamic model and its experimental validation together with power and efficiency.