University Events

Description: Mechanical Engineering (MNE) SEMINAR

DATE:
Friday, April 22, 2022

TIME:
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.

LOCATION:
Charlton College of Business (CCB), Room 115

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SPEAKER #1:
Geoffrey McNally, MS student in Mechanical Engineering (advisor: Geoffrey Cowles and Gary Kim)

TOPIC:
A Comparison of Viscous Models for Computational Fluid Mechanics

ABSTRACT:
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is an extremely powerful tool for assessing complex systems or those that aren't well documented, however it is far from being able to process complex systems in real time. Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division Newport's Underwater Vehicle Launch Dynamics Simulation (UVLDS) code is considered the Navy's gold standard for real time launch trajectory analysis of devices. To aid in better tuning input files for the UVLDS, transient CFD simulations are being performed to improve the understanding of the forces and moments that arise in certain fringe cases. As part of this investigation, extensive research has been performed on the viscous solvers used by ANSYS Fluent. This presentation focuses on the k-ϵ and k-ω 2 equation viscous models, their advantages, disadvantages, and some of the common corrections used for them.

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SPEAKER #2:
Ross Jacques, MS student in Mechanical Engineering (advisor: Banafsheh Seyedaghazadeh)

TOPIC:
Energy Harvesting of Flow-Induced Vibrations Using Sliding-Mode Triboelectric Nanogenerators

ABSTRACT:
Energy harvesting of mechanical systems has taken many forms such as piezoelectric, electrostatic, and electromagnetic transduction. Introduced in 2012, Triboelectric Nanogenerators have begun to be integrated into fabrics, jewelry, and microsensors. Typical Triboelectric Nanogenerators rely on contact electrification on which certain materials are electrically charged once they separate from each other or come into contact with a different material. While studies of Triboelectric materials have been thorough, its integration onto specific applications has been lacking. One such application is to use Sliding-Mode Triboelectric Nanogenerator (S-TENG) to harvest electrical energy from fluid flow. S-TENGs could be integrated into already existing wave energy converters to harness the wasted mechanical energy brought forth by the fluid energy. These flow-induced vibrations are quite abundant sources of energy in nature and are quite underused, so integrating S-TENGs into existing applications could help to harness this wasted energy source. Flow-induced vibrations are low frequency, high amplitude oscillations which are brought forth from an object being immersed in a flowing fluid. By capturing the energy of flow-induced vibrations, the fluid energy can be converted to mechanical energy followed by electrical energy. In this current project, our goal is to find the optimum set of S-TENG design parameters to produce the highest power output with the best efficiency. This will be achieved by understanding the role of system parameters plays in the power generation mechanism, such as the resistance in the electrical circuit, the contact area of the two TENG plates, relative displacement of the TENG plates due to increased flow velocity, flow velocity, and the contact pressure between the two TENG plates. In addition, we are interested to better understand how the power produced is scalable in such S-TENGs so that if used for larger applications, we can characterize and predict scalable power and efficiency in such systems.

For more information please contact Dr. Hangjian Ling, MNE Seminar Coordinator (hling1@umassd.edu).

All are welcome.

Students taking MNE-500 are REQUIRED to attend! All other MNE and EAS students are encouraged to attend.