Energy harvesting in a flow-induced vibrating flapper with biomimetic gaits

Energy harvesting from flow induced vibrations (FIV) in flexible bodies offer opportunities for power generation in biomimicking robotic devices and is an active area of research. The focus of this study is on investigating the underlying physics and qualitatively analysing the energy extraction scenarios in similar structural systems, comprising of a flexible piezoelectric flapper in a low Reynolds number flow regime. A high-fidelity three-way fully coupled fluid-structure-electric energy solver is developed in-house to study the energy harvesting capabilities of such a flapper, its hydrodynamic characteristics and the associated unsteady flow-field. The results indicate that the flapper deformation profiles at the most efficient harvesting regimes, resemble the propulsion gaits of natural swimmers. Investigations on the effects of a sinusoidal heaving actuation reveal no significant impact on the harvested power at the high yield (high power output) regime, identified under the passive condition showing biomimetic gait. This study provides mechanics based insights that is expected to be useful for bio-inspired designs of FIV based harvesters.

Methods
This dataset includes the codes used for the simulation in the manuscript, as well as the data generated from it. A range of flexibility and inertia parameters were used in the same code to generate the data listed in the .dat, .txt files. These datasets were used for post-processing by post-processing codes (also included here) to generate the .csv files. Details are provided in the corresponding readme.md file.

These datasets (.csv,.dat) were used to generate the figures (.fig->.eps files) with the post processing codes. The saved .eps files are then post-processed by using inkscape to generate a combined figure in .eps format. The schematics are also drawn in inkscape. Details of the data usage guidelines are mentioned in the readme file.