Camber Effects on the Power Harvesting from Piezoaeroelastic Systems

Abstract

We investigate the effects of the aerodynamic loads on the performance of piezoaeroelastic energy harvesters. The harvester consists of a rigid airfoil having a pitch and plunge degrees of freedom with a piezoelectric coupling attached to the plunge degree of freedom. The Unsteady Vortex Lattice Method is used to model the unsteady flow and predict the loads. An iterative scheme based on Humming’s fourth order predictor-corrector method is employed to solve simultaneously and interactively the governing equations. The effects of varying the airfoil camber coeffcient are determined. We demonstrate that increasing the camber does not necessarily increase the level of the harvested power.