A Flapping Leaf Structure for Electret-Based Low-Speed Wind Energy Harvesting

Sabzpoushan, Seyedali; Woias, Peter

doi:10.1109/powermems56853.2022.10007559

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…The base harvester of the current study is a leaf-like structure consisting of a double-deck cantilever beam (see figure 2, beam 1 and beam 2) mimicking the leaf stalk with a narrow-span airfoil attached to its free end [46]. The working principle of this structure is the aeroelastic interaction of the tip airfoil as a liftgenerating surface and the cantilever beam acting as a spring to create a flapping motion of the tip airfoil.…”

Section: Harvester Illustrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptivity of a leaf-inspired wind energy harvester with respect to wind speed and direction

Sabzpoushan,

Woias

2024

Bioinspir. Biomim.

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Environmental wind is a random phenomenon in both speed and direction, though it can be forecasted to some extent. An example of that is a gust which is an abrupt, but short-time change in wind speed and direction. Being a free and clean source for small-scale energy scavenging, attraction of wind is rapidly growing in the world of energy harvesters. In this paper, a leaf-like flapping wind energy harvester is introduced as the base structure in which a short-span airfoil is attached to the free end of a double-deck cantilever beam. A flap mechanism inspired by scales on sharks’ skin and a tail mechanism inspired by birds’ horizontal tail are proposed for integration to the base harvester to make it adaptive with respect to wind speed and direction, respectively. The use of the flap mechanism increases the leaf flapping frequency by +2.1 to +11.5 Hz at wind speeds of 1.5 m/s to 6.0 m/s. Therefore, since the output power of a vibrational harvester is a function of vibration frequency, a figure of merit or an efficiency parameter related to the output power will increase, as well. On the other hand, if there is a misalignment between the harvester’s heading and wind direction due to change of the latter one, the harvesting performance deteriorates. Although the base harvester can realign in certain ranges of sideslip angle at each wind speed, when the tail mechanism is integrated into that, it broadens the range of realignable sideslip angles at all the investigated wind speeds by up to 80°.

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Section: Harvester Illustrationmentioning

confidence: 99%