Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

NEW-ERAS is an enabling project that explores the concept of decentralizing the electrical power source by deploying local and autonomous vibration energy harvesters, energy storage and power management devices in rotorcraft. There is plentiful and unwanted amount of mechanical energy available in the airframe including the rotor due to vibrations normally excited by the airflow, engine operation and maneuvers during the takeoff, cruise and landing flight regimes. Under the thermodynamic point of view, vibration is an abundant and downgraded form of the total energy that is required to create lift, overcome drag and fly but has not yet been utilized. Harvesting this energy using new "smart" structures techniques in combination with wireless communication and power links can become a common solution to logistic problems associated with the implementation of new and extensive structural health monitoring and actuation systems that aim fuel consumption reduction and loads alleviation in future aircraft and rotorcraft. This is the case because all these systems are electrically powered. By having locally deployed electric power generators based on energy harvesting, dead airframe weight accompanying extensive cabling / connection devices running from the energy source (engine) to the sensor / actuator will be minimized. This saving in weight also marginally contributes to reduce fuel consumption. Although the envisioned approach for energy generation from structural vibrations may be applied to both aircraft and rotorcraft and wind turbines, NEW-ERAS will be focused on rotorcraft due to the background of the applicant, his team and their unique dedicated laboratory facilities at Carleton University.    NEW-ERAS is focused on the generation of power for rotorcraft, especially from the main rotor, which is recognized be the most important source of high-frequency forced aeroelastic vibration in rotorcraft. In addition, NEW-ERAS will investigate for the first time the use of the unique "smart-spring," developed by the applicant and co-inventors in Canada, as a low-frequency generator device to harvest the substantial energy available in the blades lead-lag motion that is otherwise dissipated by dampers to avoid rotor instability.    In summary, the question to be addressed by NEW-ERAS is how much electrical power can be practically generated, stored and recycled from the undesired mechanical vibrations in helicopter rotors during typical flight? Then, based on the available power, a few ancillary (sensor and actuator) system demonstrators that could effectively make use of this power will be investigated. The energy harvesting generators, power management and energy storage systems will be integrated with the exemplary ancillary systems to compose electrically low-power autonomous systems. Reduced-scale prototypes of these systems will be designed, fabricated then tested in laboratory-controlled experiments to answer the question.