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Monitoring fish migration, which can extend over distances of thousands of kilometers, via fish tags is important to maintain healthy fish stocks and pre-serve biodiversity. One constraint of current fish tags is the limited power of their batteries. Attaching a piezoelectric element to an oscillating part of the fish body has been proposed to develop self-powered tags. To determine the functionality and potential of this technology, we present an analysis showing variations of the generated voltage with specific aspects of the tail’s response. We also perform numerical simulations to validate the analysis and determine the effects of attaching a piezoelectric element on performance metrics including thrust generation, propulsive efficiency, and harvested electric power. The tail with the attached piezoelectric element is modeled as a unimorph beam moving at a constant forward speed and excited by sinusoidal pitching at its root. The hydrodynamic loads are calculated using three-dimensional unsteady vor-tex lattice method. These loads are coupled with the equation of motion, which is solved using the finite element method. The implicit finite different scheme is used to discretize the time-dependent generated voltage equation. The analysis shows that the harvested electric power depends on the slope of the trailing edge, a result that is validated with the numerical simulations. The numeri-cal simulations show that, depending on the excitation frequency, attaching a piezoelectric element can increase or decrease the thrust force. The balance of required hydrodynamic power, generated propulsive power and harvested elec-trical power shows that, depending on the excitation frequency, relatively high levels of harvested power can be harvested without a high adverse impact on the hydrodynamic or propulsive power. For a specified frequency of oscillations, the approach and results can be used to identify design parameters where harvested electrical power by a piezoelectric element will have a minimal adverse impact on the hydrodynamic or propulsive power of a swimming fish. 

Ocean wave energy has the potential to play a crucial role in the shift to renewable energy. In order to improve wave energy conversion techniques, it is necessary to recognize the sub-optimal nature of traditional sequential design processes due to the interconnectedness of subsystems. A codesign optimization in this paper seeks to include effects of all subsystems within one optimization loop in order to reach a fully optimal design. A width and height sweep serves as a brute force geometry optimization while optimizing the power take-off components and controls using a pseudospectral method for each geometry. An investigation of electrical power and mechanical power maximization also outlines the contrasting nature of the two objectives to illustrate electrical power maximization’s importance for identifying optimality. The codesign optimization leads to an optimal design with a width of 12 m and a height of 10 m. Ultimately, the codesign optimization leads to a 62% increase in the objective function over the optimal design from a sequential design process while also requiring only about half the power take-off torque. 

Agriculture provides a large amount of the world’s fish supply. Remote ocean farms need electric power, but most of them are not covered by the electric power grid. Ocean wave energy has the potential to provide power and enable fully autonomous farms. However, the lack of solid mounting structure makes it very challenging to harvest ocean power efficiently; the small-scale application makes high-efficiency conversion hard to achieve. To address these issues, we proposed a self-reactive ocean wave converter (WEC) and winch-based Power Take-Off (PTO) to enable a decent capture width ratio (CWR) and high power conversion efficiency. Two flaps are installed on a fish feed buoy and can move along linear guides. Ocean wave in both heave and surge directions drive the flaps to move and hence both wave potential energy and wave kinetic energy are harvested. The motion is transmitted by a winch to rotation motion to drive an electric generator, and power is harvested. Dynamic modeling is done by considering the harvester structure, the added mass, the damping, and the excitation force from ocean wave. The proposed WEC is simulated in ANSYS AQWA with excitations from regular wave and results in a gross CWR of 13%. A 1:3.5 scaled-down PTO is designed and prototyped. Bench-top experiment with Instron is done and the results show that the mechanical efficiency can reach up to 83% and has potential for real applications.