Harnessing Electrical Power from Vortex-Induced Vibration of a Circular Cylinder

The generation of electrical power from Vortex-Induced Vibration (VIV) of a cylinder is investigated numerically. The cylinder is free to oscillate in the direction transverse to the incoming flow. The cylinder is attached to a magnet that can move along the axis of a coil made from conducting wire. The magnet and the coil together constitute a basic electrical generator. When the cylinder undergoes VIV, the motion of the magnet creates a voltage across the coil, which is connected to a resistive load. By Lenz's law, induced current in the coil applies a retarding force to the magnet. Effectively, the electrical generator applies a damping force on the cylinder with a spatially varying damping coefficient. For the initial investigation reported here, the Reynolds number is restricted to Re < 200, so that the flow is laminar and two-dimensional (2D). The incompressible 2D Navier-Stokes equations are solved using an extensively validated spectral-element based solver. The effects of the electromagnetic (EM) damping constant xi_m, coil dimensions (radius a, length L), and mass ratio on the electrical power extracted are quantified. It is found that there is an optimal value of xi_m (xi_opt) at which maximum electrical power is generated. As the radius or length of the coil is increased, the value of xi_opt is observed to increase. Although the maximum average power remains the same, a larger coil radius or length results in a more robust system in the sense that a relatively large amount of power can be extracted when xi_m is far from xi_opt, unlike the constant damping ratio case. The average power output is also a function of Reynolds number, primarily through the increased maximum oscillation amplitude that occurs with increased Reynolds number at least within the laminar range, although the general qualitative findings seem likely to carry across to high Reynolds number VIV

Flow-Induced Deformation of a Flexible Thin Structure as Manifestation of Heat Transfer Enhancement

Flow-induced deformation of thin structures coupled with convective heat transfer has potential applications in energy harvesting and is important for understanding functioning of several biological systems. We numerically demonstrate large-scale flow-induced deformation as an effective passive heat transfer enhancement technique. An in-house, strongly-coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) solver is employed in which flow and structure solvers are based on sharp-interface immersed boundary and finite element method, respectively. In the present work, we validate convective heat transfer module of the in-house FSI solver against several benchmark examples of conduction and convective heat transfer including moving structure boundaries. The thermal augmentation is investigated as well as quantified for the flow-induced deformation of an elastic thin plate attached to lee side of a rigid cylinder in a heated channel laminar flow. We show that the wake vortices past the plate sweep higher sources of vorticity generated on the channel walls out into the high velocity regions, promoting the mixing of the fluid. The self-sustained motion of the plate assists in convective mixing, augmenting convection in bulk and near the walls, and thereby reducing thermal boundary layer thickness as well as improving Nusselt number at the channel walls. We quantify the thermal improvement with respect to channel flow without any bluff body and analyze the role of Reynolds number, Prandtl number and material properties of the plate in the thermal augmentation

Computational and experimental investigation of fluid-structure interaction with applications in energy harvesting and thermal augmentation

This thesis presents findings on a new kind of renewable energy source. The source of renewable energy is a free stream of fluid which can be found at many places in nature, for example, ocean currents and winds. Wind turbines are one of the examples which convert wind energy into electricity. The flow-induced vibration of a circular cylinder and a thin plate are studied for flow energy extraction. Numerical simulations and experiments were performed to assess the power extraction efficiency. The flow-induced vibration is also used for enhancing heat transfer in a heat exchanger for better efficiency