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Hydro-electromechanical modelling of a piezoelectric wave energy converter

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-11-10, 13:44 authored by Emiliano Renzi
We investigate the hydro-electromechanical coupled dynamics of a piezoelectric wave energy converter. The converter is made of a flexible bimorph plate, clamped at its ends and forced to motion by incident ocean surface waves. The piezoceramic layers are connected in series and transform the elastic motion of the plate into useful electricity by means of the piezoelectric effect. By using a distributedparameter analytical approach, we couple the linear piezoelectric constitutive equations for the plate with the potential-flow equations for the surface water waves. The resulting system of governing partial differential equations yields a new hydroelectromechanical dispersion relation, whose complex roots are determined with a numerical approach. The effect of the piezoelectric coupling in the hydro-elastic domain generates a system of short- and long-crested weakly damped progressive waves travelling along the plate. We show that the short-crested flexural wave component gives a dominant contribution to the generated power. We determine the hydroelectromechanical resonant periods of the device, at which the power output is significant.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematical Sciences

Published in

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and physical sciences

Citation

RENZI, E., 2016. Hydro-electromechanical modelling of a piezoelectric wave energy converter. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and physical sciences, 472(2195): 20160715.

Publisher

© The author. Published by the Royal Society

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-10-28

Publication date

2016

Notes

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Mathematical and physical sciences and the definitive published version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2016.0715.

ISSN

0080-4630

Language

  • en