Numerical Simulation of Induced Vibrations of the Piezoelectric Blade and Studying the Effects of Increasing Blade Tip Mass on the Resonant Frequency and the Output Voltage

Nowadays, the issue of energy supply is one of the key challenges. In recent years, in order to search for sustainable, renewable, and low cost energy sources, energy harvesting from vibrations caused by fluid flow has great importance. In the present study, an energy-harvesting device from airflow vibrations consisting of a piezoelectric blade has been studied. The blade is exposed to fluid flow at a certain distance downstream of a circular cylinder, and its behavior is simulated using a UDF code implemented to the Fluent software. According to the results of this study, the mass of the blade containing the piezoelectric layer is one of the most important factors affecting the rate of energy harvesting and increasing it will improve the output voltage. Also, in this study, the special focus is on investigation the possibility of resonance phenomenon with a change in the mass of the blade tip. It is observed with increasing mass on the blade tip from 0.9 to 1.5 g, due to the reduction of the natural frequency of the blade, the velocity of the fluid flow required for the resonance phenomenon can be reduced by up to 20%. In this research, the effect of changes of mass which is added on the tip of the blade was investigated for 3 different values, which was not observed in the previous researches..