Mr Zilian moved his scientific activities to the University of Luxembourg in 2011. Prior to this, he established a research team in the field of Computational Mechanics at the University of Braunschweig in Germany, where he also contributed as Director and Dean of Studies of the international and interdisciplinary MSc programme “Computational Sciences in Engineering”.

Generating power with smart materials and clever interactions

The galloping of bridges and cables or the flutter of aircraft wings generated by surrounding flows is what engineers call structural excitation. They have been striving to suppress these harmful movements in different ways. A dramatic example of the effects of so-called flow-induced vibrations is the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940, which boosted modern research in aeroelasticity and general fluid-structure interaction.

The key idea of the smart devices developed in FSI-HARVEST is to invert the traditional ambition to avoid the potentially dangerous interaction of structure and the surrounding fluid, and instead harness the available flow energy through controlled aero/hydro-elasticity effects. In this way, potentially harmful fluctuations are harnessed to provide independent power supply to small electrical devices.

Possible applications are numerous. They include micro electro-mechanical systems, monitoring sensors at remote locations or even in-vivo medical devices. With these devices being “smarter”, they depend less on local energy storage and also require less effort to maintain them.

Modelling and experimentation, complementing each other

This energy converter technology simultaneously involves the interaction of the structure and the surrounding fluid, the electric charge accumulated in the material (piezo-elasticity) and a controlling electrical circuit. In order to understand the observable properties of such future devices and to increase their robustness and performance, the project will develop a mathematical and numerical model of the complex physical system and further use it for systematic computational analyses. Experimental investigations complement the simulation approach and are used to validate the mathematical model and the simulation framework.

These numerical and experimental investigations into the overall system enable scientists to determine the optimal design of these “smart energy harvesters” by taking into account electric power supply under varying exterior conditions. “Computer simulations of such complex physical systems allow us to look into details that are not directly available through experiments”, Dr Zilian explains. “They make it possible to identify and understand the phenomena involved which are necessary to optimise engineering designs.”