Abstract:
Effects of volume fraction, material properties, applied mechanical loads, and boundary conditions on the harvesting coefficients are introduced in the figures. The results for a cantilever and a simply-supported plate-layer are obtained as particular cases. The result for a low frequency (static) system is obtained as a particular case by approaching the vibration frequency to zero. It is shown that volume fraction, material properties, plain compressive/tensile follower force, the location of the boundary conditions, and the vibrational frequency of the bimorph strongly influence the strain distribution, and this in effect influences the charge coefficient and the generation of energy. The proposed model can be extended to thermal energy harvesters of piezoelectric-shape memory alloy (SMA) composites.
Keywords:thermo-electro-elastic effects, energy harvesting, resonant frequency, piezoceramic, pyroelectric effect.
