• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2014.10a
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• pp.544-544
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• 2014

Energy harvesting technology, which scavenges electric power from ambient, otherwise wasted, energy sources, has been explored to develop self-powered wireless sensors and possibly eliminate the battery replacement cost for wireless sensors. Among ambient energy sources, vibration energy can be converted into electric power through a piezoelectric energy harvester. For the last decade, although tremendous advances have been made in design methodology to maximize harvestable electric power under a given vibration condition, the research in reliability assessment to ensure durability has been stagnant due to the complicated nature of the multiple failure modes of a piezoelectric energy harvester, such as the interfacial delamination, fatigue failure, and dynamic fracture. Therefore, this study presents the first-ever system reliability analysis for multiple failure modes of a piezoelectric energy harvester using the Generalized Complementary Intersection Method (GCIM), while accounts for the energy conversion performance. The GCIM enables to decompose the probabilities of high-order joint failure events into probabilities of complementary intersection events. The electromechanically-coupled analytical model is implemented based on the Kirchhoff plate theory to analyze its output performances of a piezoelectric energy harvester. Since a durable as well as efficient design of a piezoelectric energy harvester is significantly important in sustainably utilizing self-powered electronics, we believe that technical development on system reliability analysis will have an immediate and major impact on piezoelectric energy harvesting technology.