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Mechanical Engineering

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University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

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2017

Flow (Dynamics)

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Engineering

A Vertical Axis Rotor For Wave Energy Conversion, Yingchen Yang, Joab Soto, Francisco Salazar Oct 2017

A Vertical Axis Rotor For Wave Energy Conversion, Yingchen Yang, Joab Soto, Francisco Salazar

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The present work augments vertical-axis unidirectional wave energy converter (WEC) designs with a new approach. The enabling technique is the hydrodynamic design of a special rotor, which consists of a series of uniquely shaped blades in a certain formation. Specifically, individual blades are realized by revolving a two-dimensional symmetric hydrofoil about its chord line. Then the blades are arranged around a vertical shaft in a desired formation to form the rotor. When driven by an approaching flow through interaction, the rotor naturally rotates about the vertical shaft in a predefined direction. The approaching flow could be from any spatial direction, …


A Vertical Axis Wave Turbine With Hydrofoil Blades, Yingchen Yang, Isaiah Diaz, Sergio Soto Quintero Feb 2017

A Vertical Axis Wave Turbine With Hydrofoil Blades, Yingchen Yang, Isaiah Diaz, Sergio Soto Quintero

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This work discusses a new wave energy converter (WEC) design that, when deployed in waves, performs unidirectional rotation about a vertical shaft. The uniqueness of this new WEC design is on utilizing omnidirectional water flow generated by waves to drive a rotor to perform unidirectional rotation about a vertical axis. This unique feature circumvents the frequency-dependent issue of common WECs, and eliminate realignment needs to cope with dynamically changing wave propagation directions. The key component of the WEC is a rotor, which has a vertical shaft with a number of blades mounted to it. Each blade has a hydrofoil-shaped cross …