Renewable and sustainable energies exhibit promising performance while serving as the power supply of a wireless sensor especially located in marine waters. Various microgenerators have been developed to harvest wave energy. However, the conversion ability from a dynamic oscillating source of wave is crucial to enhance their effectiveness in practical applications. In this paper, a new piezoelectric converter system is proposed to harvest the kinetic energy from ocean waves. The vortex-induced effect in an air channel enhances the vibration performance, improving the energy harvesting efficiency. The system comprises an oscillating water column (OWC) air chamber, a bluff body, and a piezoelectric piece for electromechanical transduction. The fluid–solid–electric coupling finite element method was used to investigate the relation between the output voltage and geometrical parameters, including the size and position of the piezoelectric cantilever beam, which is based on the user-defined function of the ANSYS. It is found that the bluff body in the outlet channel above the air chamber induced high-frequency vortex shedding vibration. The regular wave rushed into the air chamber with a frequency of 0.285 Hz and extruded the air across the bluff body in the outlet channel. This incurred the fluctuation of the air pressure and excited the piezoelectric cantilever beam vibration with a high frequency of 233 Hz in the wake region. Furthermore, a continuous electrical output with a peak voltage of 6.11 V is generated, which has potential applications for the wireless sensors on the marine buoy.
Hydraulic turbine runners experience high excitation forces in their daily operations, and these excitations may cause resonances to runners, which may induce high vibrations and shorten the runner's lifetimes. Increasing the added damping of runners in water can be helpful to reduce the vibration level during resonances. Some studies have shown that the modification of the trailing edge shape can be helpful to increase added damping of hydrofoils in water. However, the influence of blade trailing edge shape on the added damping of hydraulic turbine runners has been studied in a limited way before. Due to the difficulties to study this problem experimentally, the influence of blade trailing edge shape on a Kaplan turbine runner has been studied numerically in this paper and the one-way FSI method was implemented. The performances of three different turbulence models, including the
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,
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, and transition SST models, in the added damping simulation of the NACA 0009 hydrofoil were evaluated by comparing with the available results of the two-way FSI simulation in the references. Results show that, unlike the significantly different performances in the two-way FSI method, the performances of all the turbulence models are very close in the one-way FSI method. Then, the
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turbulence model was applied to the added damping simulation of a Kaplan turbine runner, and results show that the modification of the blade trailing edge shape can be helpful to increase the added damping to some extent.
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