Energy harvesting from fluid flow using cantilever beam integrated with piezoelectric layer

Being inspired by nature and moving towards clean energy has become a very necessary and indispensable objective these days. By observing a collection of plants/vegetation growing underneath the rivers, oceans, and seas, the idea of designing a plant farm being capable of absorb fluid energy was born. The farm comprises numerous aluminum cantilever beams equipped with a piezoelectric layer in different shapes. The field has elements of different sizes and natural frequencies, where the maximum voltage can be obtained using the resonance phenomenon. Frequency of the fluid flow is considered, because it follows the oscillatory behavior of the wakes and vortices when the fluid passes through the obstacle. The Strouhal number helps to obtain the fluid frequency according to the fluid velocity and the characteristic length of the barrier. In this research, it was observed that the increase in the length of the aluminum layer caused a rise in the voltage generated. The triangular model produced a higher amount of voltage compared with the other three-dimensional models i.e. the rectangular, trapezoidal and triangular ones. Therefore, it was concluded that providing the farm with triangular elements with different dimensions is considered to be an effective and reasonable measure. Actually, having a variety of sizes of these elements covers a wide range of natural frequencies causing a higher number of them to be excited.