The investigation of V-shaped arrays with non-uniform diameter cylinders for high performance hydrokinetic energy conversion

Abstract

Harnessing hydrokinetic energy through vortex-induced vibration (VIV) is of great significance. The energy capture efficiency of VIV cylindrical arrays still has great potentials for making further progress. This paper investigates the energy conversion performance of cylinder cluster arrays with non-uniform diameter positioned at the upstream, midstream, and downstream locations, utilizing the downstream VIV enhancement effect. The cylinder arrays consist of five cylinders with non-uniform diameters of 2, 3, and 4 cm, resulting in a total of eight different V-shaped configuration scenarios. Through numerical simulation, it is found that the optimal flow velocity for maximizing the cylinder vibration amplitude is 0.8 m/s. In the condition of 0.8 m/s flow velocity, this study investigates the impact of cylinder diameter and the array arrangement on lift force, amplitude response, vortex shedding frequency, converted power, and efficiency. If the diameter of a cylinder is smaller than that of its upstream cylinder, cylinder experiences an enhanced amplitude, and the magnitude of this enhancement increases with the difference in diameters between the two cylinders. The blocking effect in the cylinder array occurs at a distance of two times the diameter. It has been observed that the small diameter cylinder demonstrates exceptional performance, achieving the highest converted power of 6.58 W (88% higher than the single cylinder) and the highest conversion efficiency of 68 % (75% higher than the single cylinder) in the convergent V-shaped array. The divergent V-shaped array achieves a maximum total converted power of 17.12 W (14% higher than the average conversion efficiency of single 2 cm, 3 cm, 4 cm cylinders), while the convergent V-shaped array achieves a maximum total conversion efficiency of 44% (24% higher than the average conversion efficiency of single 2 cm, 3 cm, 4 cm cylinders). This study presents an innovative perspective on the VIV enhancement effect in energy conversion, specifically focusing on multi-cylinder arrays with non-uniform diameters.