C6.1 - Topology Optimization of a Piezoelectric Energy Harvester
- Event
- SENSOR+TEST Conferences 2009
2009-05-26 - 2009-05-28
Congress Center Nürnberg - Band
- Proceedings SENSOR 2009, Volume II
- Chapter
- C6 - Energy Harvesting
- Author(s)
- F. Wein, E. Weller, T. Albach, A. Sutor, R. Lerch - Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany
- Pages
- 201 - 206
- DOI
- 10.5162/sensor09/v2/c6.1
- ISBN
- 978-3-9810993-5-5
- Price
- free
Abstract
We use a thin piezoelectric layer attached to a mechanical plate to harvest mechanical energy as available at the vibrating skin of machinery. By modifying the material distribution of the piezoelectric layer the resonance frequency of the energy harvester is adjusted to maximize the objective function. In this paper the electric energy and the electric potential is maximized. This topology optimization problem is performed by a variant of the SIMP (Solid Isotropic Material with Penalization) method which determines for every finite element cell if it is better to have piezoelectric material at that location or not. Numerical results are shown for single frequency pressure excitations from a broad frequency range. The objective functions electric potential, electric energy, energy conversion factor and mean transduction are discussed.