Estudo e desenvolvimento de hidrofólio oscilante com asa mutável

Abstract

An energy converter from tidal and ocean currents, known as a flapping foil, was developed in the present work. This device is designed with a morphing wing geometry and to be fixed to the foundation of offshore wind turbines to achieve superior performance over the rigid wing-flapping foil and to take advantage of available structures to reduce costs. For the development of this project, the following steps were carried out: simplified mathematical modeling; mapping and selection of morphing wing profiles; sensitivity analysis of geometric, viscous, and movement parameters; the conception of the came-based wing mutation mechanism; and design and complete mathematical modeling of the flapping foil with a morphing wing. Subsequently, simulations of the device performance versus rigid wing hydrofoils were performed, demonstrating that the morphing wing has greater efficiency in scenarios where fluid velocity variations occur. The main contributions of this work involve some design aspects, such as the proposed methodology to map and select the ideal profiles for the morphing wing and, in addition, proposing an ideal mutable profile; and the innovative design of a wing mutation mechanism, changing the thickness with the use of came, using the characteristics of the NACA profiles themselves to generalize the mechanism