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Aero-electric evaluation of piezoelectric materials on small monitoring UAVs

Abstract:

Piezoelectric devices are components that can be used to harvest energy from mechanical vibrations, in aircrafts these can be gather from wings or fuselage pressure oscillations. This work evaluates a conceptual architecture of a piezoelectric energy harvesting system for auxiliary power generation in small UAVs. The method developed subdivides the analysis of the energy harvesting system in two modules: aeroelastic and electrical, the former evaluates the oscillations and stresses over the piezoelectric element, whilst the latter assesses the power generation range for different flight velocities. For the aeromechanic analysis a low and high fidelity approaches are used. The low-fidelity modelling is based on a simplified lifting surface for the dynamic and vibrational analysis, whereas the high-fidelity approach uses a commercial CFD package to evaluate the fluid-structure interaction. For the electrical system a low fidelity simulation software is used to set the power generation rating and optimal electronic elements to suit the electrical signal accordingly to the UAV needs. In order to assess the suitability of the piezoelectric systems, a small electric UAV, which performs monitoring tasks is used as baseline configuration. Results show that the model implemented for the evaluation of these systems accurately reproduces the performance pbkp_redicted by experimental studies. Regarding the potential of piezoelectric configurations, it was observed that speeds above 12 m/s are suitable for the production of energy for auxiliary power systems.