 Performance evaluation and enhancement of a semi-activated flapping hydrofoil in shear flowsZhen Liu, Hengliang Qu and Hongda Shi Energy, 2019, vol. 189, issue C Abstract: The semi-activated flapping hydrofoil is a promising device for harvesting tidal stream energy in shallow water with a relatively higher efficiency. A two-dimensional numerical model, based on the computational fluid dynamics software ANSYS-Fluent, was established and validated to investigate a semi-activated hydrofoil with activated pitching and induced heaving motions in the shear flows. It was found that the hydrofoil can reach a stable stage to passively heave about an equilibrium point at various shear rates. Since the hydrofoil is pushed toward the low-velocity areas, its energy-harvesting efficiencies whether or not considering the hydrodynamic torques are lower than that in the uniform flow. Two controlling strategies were used to specifically restrict the downward motion ranges, namely a stop block or a linear spring, which demonstrated the ability to significantly increase the two efficiencies under various controlling parameters. The highest efficiencies of 0.50 and 0.52 were achieved using a linear spring at the shear rate of 2.0. Keywords: Flapping hydrofoil; Energy harvesting; Semi-activated; Shear flow; Controlling strategy; Numerical simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:189:y:2019:i:c:s0360544219319504 DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.116255 Access Statistics for this article Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser More articles in Energy from Elsevier |
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