Alessandro Escobar
Research Mentor: Michael Bernitsas
Mentor Department: Naval Architecture & Marine Engineering, Engineering
Author(s): Alessandro Escobar, Richard QU, Michael Bernitsas
Session: Session 1 (9:00 AM – 9:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 125
Abstract
Vortex-Induced Vibration for Aquatic Clean Energy (VIVACE) is a renewable energy technology which aims to harness the horizontal marine hydrokinetic energy that exists in river flows, ocean currents and tides to generate power. Specifically, current research focuses on understanding VIVACE systems by analyzing past experimental data and generating simulations with different sets of parameters. The first part of our study is to process and visualize the raw data obtained from years of past experiments. By transforming raw measurements into visual representations, like time-series plots and frequency carpet-plots, we are able to understand the oscillatory response and frequency locking behaviors across different ranges and variations of flow speed, spring stiffness and damping. Through these graphs, we are able to identify dominant vibration patterns relevant to efficiently harnessing energy. The second part of this research involves using computational fluid dynamics through OpenFoam to model the fluid structure interactions present in VIVACE. These simulations aim to further understand the underlying flow physics like vortex shredding patterns and to explain observed behaviors. Together, the experimental data analysis and processing, with modeling via computational fluid dynamics simulations, contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics at play in VIVACE and allows for the optimization of flow induced oscillations as a scalable, viable and renewable source of energy.
