Energy harvesting from the discrete gust response of a piezoaeroelastic wing: Modeling and performance evaluation

The objective of this paper is to investigate energy harvesting from the unfavorable gust response of a piezoelectric wing. An aeroelectroelastic model is built for the evaluation and improvement of the harvesting performance. The structural model is built based on the Euler–Bernoulli beam theory. The unsteady aerodynamics, combined with 1-cosine gust load, are obtained from Jones׳ approximation of the Wagner function. The state-space equation of the aeroelectroelastic model is derived and solved numerically. The energy conversion efficiency and output density are defined to evaluate the harvesting performance. The effects of the sizes and location of the piezoelectric transducers, the load resistance in the external circuit, and the locations of the elastic axis and gravity center axis of the wing are studied, respectively. The results show that, under a given width of the transducers in chordwise direction, there are one thickness of the transducers corresponding to highest conversion efficiency and one smaller optimal value for the output density. The conversion efficiency has an approximate linear relationship with the width. As the transducers are placed at the wing root, a maximum conversion efficiency is reached under a certain length in the spanwise direction, whereas a smaller length helps reaching a larger output density. One optimal resistance is found to maximize the conversion efficiency. The rearward shift of either the elastic axis or gravity center axis improves the energy output while reducing the conversion efficiency.