Two mechanical engineering graduate students have won the best paper award in the student paper competition at the ASME 2016 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE 2016). Their paper, “An Experimentally-Validated Distributed-Parameters Model of a Ferrofluid Based Energy Harvester,” was presented by Saad Alazmi at the conference.
The paper was authored by Saad Alazmi, a PhD student in mechanical engineering; and Yawen Xu, a MS student in mechanical engineering who graduated in August 2016. Their advisor is Mohammed Daqaq, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and Dale Reynolds ’67 Emerging Faculty Scholar.
The ASME IDETC/CIE 2016 conference was held at the Charlotte Convection Center in Charlotte, North Carolina on August 21 to 24.
In this paper, we develop a distributed-parameters nonlinear model, which governs the electro-magneto-hydrodynamics of an electromagnetic ferrofluid-based energy harvester. The operation principle of the harvester is based on the sloshing of a magnetized ferrofluid inside a rectangular container. The motion of the sloshing liquid creates a time-varying magnetic flux which can be used to induce an electromotive force in a coil adjacent to the container. This process generates an electric current, and therewith, transduces external vibrations into electric energy. An approximate analytical solution of the model is obtained using perturbation methods and the results are compared to experimental findings illustrating good qualitative agreement.
