Design of Aeroelastic Wind Belt for Low-Energy Wind Harvesting

Malaysia plans to increase the total renewable energy mix to 30% by the year 2030 as part of the Green Technology Master Plan. Currently, the role of wind power is not included in the renewable energy mix of Malaysia and diversification of the renewable energy mix needs to be encouraged to include policy support for other sources of energy. The wind speed Malaysia is ranged from 3-7 m/s and most wind turbine requires 5 m/s as cut in speed. The low average wind speeds causes wind turbine to be the least cost-effective method to generate electricity at Malaysia especially at the west coast. Therefore, low-energy wind harvesting device is proposed as alternative at this climate. This device is also intended to generate power from vehicle-induced wind. Three potential configurations (electromagnetic, piezoelectric or electrostatic) for small-scale energy harvesting device were proposed by previous researchers and studied in this work. Electromagnetic configuration of energy harvesting by fluttering was selected after analysis of three configurations. A wind belt was designed to withstand environmental conditions such as fresh water (rain), UV radiation and acid/alkali conditions. Several important parameters such as belt width, location of the magnet etc for the design were evaluated experimentally. Taffeta silk was selected as the belt materials from potential materials. The optimum length and width of the belt in this study are 1 m and 12 mm. Neodymium N45 magnet was selected based on inductance and the optimum magnet position along the belt is 20cm from the edges of the main frame. Experimental results showed the peak power recorded in parallel connection are 81.02 mW @ 6 m/s with a belt tension of 0.816 N and 24.54 mW @ 4 m/s with belt tension of 0.612 N.