Energy of a resonant damped harmonic oscillator.

[desil]

Hello everyone,
first off I'd like to point out that English is not my first language, and to apologize for the naivety of my question (which is mostly out of curiosity).
I was wondering if there were any practical use of resonant damped harmonic oscillators as a way to extract energy, with a dynamo for instance(in the physical world, oscillators are always damped in some way, right?).
My questions arises from the formula for the energy of the resonant oscillator (that you can see here:

https://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/152.mf1i.spring02/Oscillations4.htm,

at the part 'Back to reality'): if the friction coefficient goes to zero, then the energy of the oscillator should approach infinity. This way, by trying to reduce friction, shouldn't we have a huge amount of energy we could exploit? Or is friction going to zero physically impossibile? Does this have any practical application?
Thank you in advance.

 

[GregLocock]

Hmm, well, yes it does. Automotive turbochargers are tuned so that their natural frequency, governed by moment of inertia and aeroelasticity, extracts more energy from the exhaust pulses at some selected operating condition, than if they run at constant rpm. I'm sure there are other examples where resonance is used to maximise some attribute of an energy gathering system, perhaps coupled water/air oscillators for wave power would be a likely contender.



Cheers

Greg Locock


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