Research on energy extraction characteristics of an adaptive deformation oscillating-wing

Oscillating foil machines represent a type of flow energy harvesters which perform pitching and plunging motions simultaneously to harness the energy from incoming stream. In this paper, a new adaptive deformation oscillating wing was proposed and the theoretical performance of such a concept was studied here through unsteady two-dimensional simulations using an in-house developed computational fluid dynamics code. During operation, the proposed oscillating foil whose initial shape is symmetric can be deformed into a cambered foil, which aims to produce large lift force. Our numerical results suggest that the power efficiency of the proposed oscillating foil can be about 16.1% higher than the conventional oscillating foil without deformation. In addition, the effects of the maximum bending displacement and effective angle of attack on the efficiency of proposed oscillating foil were also discussed in this work. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.