Abstract
Energy harvesting using Polyvinylidene-fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric beams from fluid-induced flutter was studied. Vibration tests were performed to compare the power output of a piezoelectric beam subject to bending, and coupled bending-torsion loading conditions. A piezoelectric, harmonic computational analysis was done to further investigate the effect of the bending-torsion loading condition. It was evident that by inciting bending and torsion in the beam simultaneously, higher power outputs were achieved. However, when the tests were conducted in a wind tunnel with fluid forcing as opposed to steady-state vibration, the power output of the combined bending and torsion case was much lower than the bending-only case. High-speed image data indicated that the configurations subjected to bending-torsion flutter had lower bending deformations and were more prone to chaotic flapping, which inherently resulted in reduced power outputs. Finally, a vertical stalk configuration was examined, which produced five times more power compared to the horizontal stalk configuration at 8m/s wind speed due to excessive non-linear bending.
Highlights
IntroductionWill continue to be, an important area for researchers
Energy harvesting has been, and will continue to be, an important area for researchers
The cause for the excessive power output is explained with the help of high-speed video results . 4.4.2 High-Speed Footage High-speed footage for the vertical stalk configuration was captured at 1000 frames/second
Summary
Will continue to be, an important area for researchers. Piezoelectric materials have played an important role, since they can transduce mechanical vibrations into electrical energy. Flutter has been exploited to generate electrical energy from compliant piezoelectric materials, such as PVDF. This concept was initially studied only with an academic interest but was later used for practical engineering purposes (Païdoussis, 1998). There has been extensive work done elsewhere to understand flutter of plates and membranes (Lord Rayleigh, 1879; Theodorsen, 1949; Datta and Gottenberg, 1975; Argentina and Mahadevan, 2005). In 2001, the concept of an energy harvesting 'eel' was introduced (Allen and Smits, 2001). The 'eel' consisted of a PVDF-laden membrane clamped at its leading edge. The eel was placed in a parallel flow, downstream of a vortex shedding bluff body that induced time-varying deformations of the eel, according to the vortex shedding frequency
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