Theoretical Investigation of Three-Phase Alternating Current Liquid Metal Vortex Magnetohydrodynamic Generator

The ever-growing demand for mobile electronics and recent developments in communication technology have increased our dependence on batteries. However, batteries have several limitations like the need for frequent charging and a short life span. Ambient energy sources like solar energy, wind energy, and hydro energy are some of the most common renewable power sources that can be used instead of batteries. However, they have various limitations when it comes to powering mobile electronics. Energy harvesting from environmental mechanical motion can provide a valuable alternative in many situations. This work explores Magnetohydrodynamic generators (MHD), which are a class of devices that can be used to directly convert the kinetic energy of the flowing fluid to electrical energy. Apart from demonstrating a novel design of a liquid metal-based vortex MHD, this work also introduces and investigates several theoretical approximation approaches to the analysis of a vortex MHD. The formulated approach shows that such MHD devices can be easily scaled for various applications requiring power in a range from mW to W. In addition, this work further investigates the variation of the MHD output power with various system parameters.