Magnetic levitation (maglev) concepts are applied to a variety of industries such as the automotive, aerospace, or energy in order to accomplish different tasks: suspension and propulsion in maglev trains, rocket propulsion and spacecraft attitude control, centrifuge of nuclear reactors. In this paper, maglev is implemented in environmentally friendly hydrokinetic energy harvesting to achieve contactless bearing, thus, minimizing friction and improving efficiency. Generally, maglev systems exhibit higher efficiency and reduced maintenance while providing longer lifetime and higher durability when appropriate engineering design and control are applied. A Flow Induced Oscillation (FIO) energy-harvesting converter is considered in this work. To minimize friction in the support of the cylinder in FIO (vortex induced vibrations and galloping) due to high hydrodynamic drag, a maglev system is proposed. In the proposed configuration, a ferromagnetic core (element 1), of known dimensions, is considered under the effects of an externally imposed magnetic field. A second ferromagnetic element, of smaller dimensions, is then placed adjacent to the previous considered core. This particular configuration results in a non-homogenous magnetic field for element 1, caused by dimensional disparity. Specifically, the magnetic flux does not follow a linear path from the ferromagnetic core to element 2. A general electromagnetic analysis is conducted to derive an analytical form for the magnetic field of element 1. Subsequent numerical simulation validates the obtained formula. This distinct expression for the magnetic field is valuable towards calculating the magnetic energy of this specific configuration, which is essential to the design of the FIO energy harvesting converter considered in this work.
Linearity of ferromagnetic core solenoids used as magnetic sensors.
