Abstract
This paper presents a novel airfoil-based piezoelectric energy harvester (EH) with two small square prisms attached to an airfoil. This harvester can achieve a two degree-of-freedom (DOF) plunge–pitch motions. Several prototypes of energy harvester were fabricated to explore the nonlinear aerodynamic response and the output performance in a wind tunnel. The experimental results showed that the longer the flexible spring was, the lower the critical velocity and frequency of the harvester were, and the better aerodynamic response and output performance could be achieved. The initial disturbance, the following limit-cycle oscillation, and the ultimate chaos of nonlinear response occurred, as increasing airflow velocity was increased. The overall output performance of the harvesters with a flexible spring having a thickness of 1 mm outperformed than that of the harvesters with a flexible spring having a thickness of 0.5 mm at a higher airflow velocity, while the tendency was opposite at a lower velocity. An optimum output voltage of 17.48 V and a power of 0.764 mW were harvested for EH-160-1 at 16.32 m/s, which demonstrated it possessed better performance than the other harvesters. When the capacitor was charged for 45 s and directly drove a sensor, it could maintain working for 17 s to display temperature and humidity in real time.
Highlights
Vibration-based energy harvesters which are usually located at remote or inconveniently accessible places, are considered as promising independent power sources for low-power electric devices and have been studied [1,2,3]
Energy harvesting from flutter-induced vibration has been extensively investigated in recent decades [29,30,31,32]
It was found that a continuous peak power of 4 mW was obtained at 4 m/s. Inman and his coauthors [36,37,38] designed a piezoelectric composite wing for energy harvesting and gust alleviation simultaneously in a small unmanned aerial vehicle, which achieved the better performance of energy harvesting and gust alleviation during normal flight and gust response
Summary
Vibration-based energy harvesters which are usually located at remote or inconveniently accessible places, are considered as promising independent power sources for low-power electric devices and have been studied [1,2,3]. Zhou et al [48] proposed a novel Y-shaped bi-stable energy harvester with two curved wings and a tip magnet, which demonstrated that the harvester could execute snap-through and reach coherence resonance in a wide range of airflow velocity Dowell and his coauthors [49,50,51] investigated a flutter and the limit-cycle oscillation of a fixed cantilever beam. An aerodynamic model was developed, and the effects of airflow velocity on aeroelastic vibration and limit-cycle oscillation were obtained Xiang and his coauthors [52,53] proposed a novel pitch–plunge–leadlag airfoil-based piezoaeroelastic energy harvester and investigated numerically the effects of the structural parameters of the harvester on the aeroelastic characteristics and the output power.
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