Collaborative Research: GOALI: Bio-inspired bistable energy harvesting for fish telemetry tags

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Aquatic systems are highly interconnected, which allow fish to traverse long distances, to dive through a water column, and, for some species, to move between fresh and saltwater environments. There is critical and urgent need for long-life unremitting fish monitoring technologies that can help with understanding fish behavior, selecting offshore wind farm sites, operating hydroelectric power plants, and assessing environmental impacts of marine hydrokinetic energy systems. The total market value of global telemetry including fish telemetry tags is estimated to reach $243 billion by 2020. Current fish telemetry tags are constrained by the limited lifetime of batteries, and periodic battery replacements are expensive and harmful to the fish. Another challenge is how to attach these tags to a fish with minimum impact on its normal life. Implanting a tag inside a fish body constitutes a complicated surgery process with the risk of impeding the fish life, and the mechanical clamping to the fin may negatively affect the fish motions. Therefore, this proposal aims at investigating a self-powered strategy and a bio- inspired attachment method for fish telemetry tags through energy harvesting from the surrounding fluid and fish maneuvering.The goals of this GOALI project are to design and validate a novel bio-inspired attachment with a minimal influence on fish life and mobility and a bio-inspired broadband energy harvester to achieve a self-powered fish telemetry tag. The proposed bio-inspired fish tag consists of a bio-inspired bi-stable energy harvester, a bio-inspired sucking disc, an acoustic transmitter, and an integrated circuit board that contains both the transmission circuit, sensors, and the energy-harvesting management circuit. Particularly, the principle behind the Venus flytrap will be fully understood to investigate the snap-through dynamics of the proposed bi-stable galloping piezoelectric harvester subjected to the combined excitations from fish maneuver and fluid flow. The remora-shark "symbiotic relationship" will be studied and used to guide the design of the bio-inspired sucking pad with stiff metal-based teeny spikes (in mimic the lamellar spinules) to attach the harvester on the fish. The specific work scope includes (1) a bio-inspired design of an attachment mechanism and a self-power sensing and communication system, (2) modeling of the fluid-structure-piezoelectric interaction, (3) the bio-inspired dynamics of the bi-stable piezoelectric energy harvester under complex excitations, and (4) experimental validation on robotic fish, live fish, and on-site demonstrations to investigate the performance and the influence of harvester on the fish life and mobility. The research is integrated with an educational and outreach plan, including course development, undergraduate research, K-12 students and teachers, and opportunities for minorities and women. The active collaboration between the two universities and industry will guide fundamental research to solve a critical industry need and enable wide dissemination and accelerated implementation of developed knowledge with immediate industry impacts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.