A computational method for modeling the multi-physical interactions of electromagnetic wind energy harvesters in tandem arrangement

Abstract

This work presented a coupled formulation for evaluating the interaction of multiple inductive energy harvesters. The multi-physics problem of Fluid–Structure Interaction (FSI) and electromagnetic induction was addressed through a coupled model based on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach and an electro-mechanical formulation.The Navier–Stokes equations were coupled to those of an oscillating rigid body and the Faraday’s law of induction for representing the electromagnetic vibration transducers. The proposed model was implemented by developing an OpenFOAM library. A finite element model (FEMM) was used for obtaining the magnetic flux derivative. The library was configured to map out the electromagnetic field and mechanical properties for each harvester and then, the electro-mechanical equations were solved by the explicit Runge–Kutta 2nd order scheme. For validating the coupled formulation, numerical simulations of an inductive energy harvester composed of two cylinders in tandem were conducted and compared to experiments published in the scientific literature. In order to demonstrate that the proposed formulation could be suitable for modeling complex configurations of harvesters, numerical simulations of three electromagnetic energy harvesters in array were executed and their performance was evaluated.