D'Souza receives NSF award for energy harvesting research
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) professor Kiran D’Souza recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his project titled, “Vibration Energy Harvesting to Meet Power Demands for the Electric Grid and Remote Sensing.”
The grant is part of the NSF’s Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) program that is aimed at transforming innovations created through NSF-sponsored awards into products or businesses. D’Souza’s award is focused on developing new controllable piecewise linear (PWL) energy harvesters.
These new PWL energy harvesters are frequency-tunable devices that would substantially increase power generation from energy harvesters used in many applications.
“These new harvesters will combine efficient analyses of PWL system responses with active control of the gap size in the system to ensure the system stays at resonance over a large frequency range,” D’Souza said.
The focus of his project is to move from computational simulations to a simple bench-top experiment, and eventually a fully functioning prototype harvester capable of remote sensing. D’Souza also plans to create a design to integrate the prototype into a water buoy harvester.
This project builds off an invention that was created through D’Souza’s 2019 NSF project, “Analyzing and Exploiting Hybrid Dynamical Systems with Piecewise-Linear Nonlinearities.”
“This award seeks to provide new understanding and analysis tools for PWL nonlinear systems that arise from intermittent contact, friction contact, cracks, large displacement at joints, and stiffness changes,” D’Souza said.
D’Souza says the goal of his work is to create a design of a PWL energy harvesting water buoy that can turn ocean wave energy into another viable renewable energy source. Doing so would lower greenhouse emissions while meeting growing consumer energy demands.
“These devices will have a particularly large impact in extracting energy from ocean waves using water buoys,” said D’Souza. “Although these waves can provide a substantial source of green energy, with traditional approaches the energy extraction is currently too expensive.”
The total recoverable energy along the U.S. continental shelf would be nearly one-third of the energy used in the U.S. each year. Additionally, these more effective harvesters can be used to power a wide array of remote sensors used for monitoring safety and reliability of civil structures and engineering systems.
The core technical team working alongside professor D’Souza consists of Post-Doctoral Researcher Eric Kurstak, and Bachelors/Masters student Jacob Veney. The team is in collaboration with Ohio State’s Technology Commercialization Office, as well as other industry partners, including Rev1 Ventures and the Center for Design and Manufacturing Excellence.
The $250,000 NSF grant sponsors much of the entrepreneurial activities D’Souza and his team are involved in. The award also provides support for technical development, prototyping and design work.
D’Souza gave a special thanks to recent NSF PFI awardees, MAE professors David Hoelzle, Hanna Cho and Haijun Su, who shared proposals and gave advice on the PFI program.
