Energy harvesting efficiency of piezoelectric flags in axial flows

By S. Michelin, Olivier Doaré. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2012

245 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Self-sustained oscillations resulting from fluid–solid instabilities, such as the flutter of a flexible flag in axial flow, can be used to harvest energy if one is able to convert the solid energy into electricity. Here, this is achieved using piezoelectric patches attached to the surface of the flag, which convert the solid deformation into an electric current powering purely resistive output circuits. Nonlinear numerical simulations in the slender-body limit, based on an explicit description of the coupling between the fluid–solid and electric systems, are used to determine the harvesting efficiency of the system, namely the fraction of the flow kinetic energy flux effectively used to power the output circuit, and its evolution with the system’s parameters. The role of the tuning between the characteristic frequencies of the fluid–solid and electric systems is emphasized, as well as the critical impact of the piezoelectric coupling intensity. High fluid loading, classically associated with destabilization by damping, leads to greater energy harvesting, but with a weaker robustness to flow velocity fluctuations due to the sensitivity of the flapping mode selection. This suggests that a control of this mode selection by a careful design of the output circuit could provide some opportunities to improve the efficiency and robustness of the energy harvesting process.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c495953107088b922d2a9f0b7067e44aa0110b2a

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Citations in the corpus

Flapping dynamics of an inverted flag (2013, methodology): “Then, the strain energy is converted to electrical energy with piezoelectric materials (Allen & Smits 2001; Taylor et al. 2001; Akaydin, Elvin & Andreopoulos 2010; Li, Yuan & Lipson 2011; Michelin & Doaré 2013).”
Energy harvesting by means of flow-induced vibrations on aerospace vehicles (2016, background): “Deformations are expected to be similar to a beam-like model [75].”
Flapping dynamics of an inverted flag in a uniform flow (2015, background): “Second, the electrical energy is harvested by the piezoelectric materials attached to the flexible structures (Michelin and Doare, 2013).”