posted on 2017-10-18, 12:50authored byMorteza Ghorbani, Ali Mohammadi, Ahmad Reza Motezakker, Luis Guillermo Villanueva, Yusuf Leblebici, Ali Koşar
Energy harvesting from thermal energy
has been widely exploited
to achieve energy savings and clean technologies. In this research,
a new cost-effective and environment-friendly solution is proposed
for the growing individual energy needs thanks to the energy application
of cavitating flows. With the aid of cavitating jet flows from microchannel
configurations of different sizes, it is shown that significant temperature
rise (as high as 5.7 °C) can be obtained on the surface of the
thin plate. The obtained heat energy could be integrated to a thermoelectric
power generator, which can be used as a power resource for consumer
devices, such as cell phones and laptops. To explore the difference
in the temperature rise with different microtube diameters, namely,
152, 256, 504, and 762 μm, and also with different upstream
pressures of 10, 20, 40, and 60 bar, the cavitation flow patterns
are captured and analyzed using an advanced high-speed visualization
system. The analysis of the captured data showed that different flow
patterns exist for different diameters of the microtubes, including
a pattern shift from micro- to macroscale, which accompanied the pattern
of temporal results very well.