Enhanced thermal and angular velocity-induced hybrid piezoelectric energy harvesting of smart turbine blades

Abstract

In this study, an approach is proposed to examine hybrid piezoelectric energy harvesting performances from vibrations induced by thermal and angular velocity loads in order to generate energy from the smart turbine blade. In the proposed method, a smart turbine blade is formed by patching the piezoelectric material to the root surface of the turbine blade. A finite element (FE) model of the smart turbine blade is established and then it is validated with a smart blade model in a reference study to test the reliability and accuracy of the FE method. The defined loads are applied to the smart blade to obtain energy from mechanical vibrations induced by thermal and angular velocity loads. Temperature distribution, voltage, and vibration results obtained from energy harvesting analysis under different thermal and angular velocity loads are presented. In order to investigate the energy conversion efficiency of the energy obtained from the system, the energy harvesting circuit is tested in terms of battery discharge times and power output values. The results show that while the maximum energy conversion in the thermally induced smart turbine blade is 11.9 W, a power output of 12.3 W is obtained from the hybrid energy harvesting mechanism under angular velocity and heat flux loads.