Flapping Foil Hydrokinetic Turbine: From a Strongly Coupled FSI Solver to the Experiment in a Confined Channel

2021 
At a time of reframing the classic large-scale energy production and networks, several devices have been designed to fully exploit the hydroelectric potential all around the world. One of those promising micro-hydro concepts is the bio-inspired flapping foil harvester, based on the aeroelastic oscillations emerged from the fluid-structure interactions of an elastically mounted airfoil and a uniform fluid flow. With the aim of better understanding the dynamics of a fully-passive flapping foil turbine in low-speed water flows, a 2D model has been implemented and validated within open-source toolboxes. This model has shown to be capable of reproducing accurately the self-sustained oscillations of the foil by means of a strongly coupled fluid-structure solver, leading the design of a reduced scale prototype for parametric study in a free surface water channel. The first experimental tests showed that a self-sustained oscillations regime exists under a wise choice of the structural parameters and that is highly sensitive to the position of the elastic axis center and the pitching stiffness. In addition, it has been found that a significant amount of dry friction present on both degrees of freedom limits considerably the prototype’s performance, which led to the design of an active compensation strategy.
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