A numerical feasibility study on wing flutter-based energy device via fluid-structure coupling

摘要

A wing flutter based energy device is investigated numerically using a fully coupled Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and Computational Structural Dynamics (CSD) method. Different from existing energy extractor device studies using flutter mechanism, the structural displacement in present study is entirely determined by the unsteady loading which is part of CFD solutions. Investigations encompass the impact of device's mass and external dash damper on the output power over a wide range of wind speed. It is found that a periodic stable structural displacement is sustainable at given wind speed when the wing reaches flutter conditions, and thus energy can be directly extracted by flutter. The time-mean output power increases considerably with wind speed. More power can be extracted by reducing system mass ratio. The impact of damping coefficient on the power output is only significant at low damping coefficient.