• 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.

• Advances in Computational Design
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.37-60
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• 2016

In this paper an electromechanically coupled isogeometric finite element is utilized to analyse Lamb wave excitation with piezoceramic actuators. An effective actuator design reduces the energy needed for Lamb wave excitation, which is beneficial if a structural health monitoring system should be applied for a structure. For a better understanding of the actuator behavior the piezoeceramics are studied both free and bonded at a structure. The numerical part of the analysis is performed utilizing isogeometric finite elements. To obtain the optimal performance for the numerical analysis the effect of k-refinement of the isogeometric element with respect to the convergence is studied and discussed. The optimal numerical setup with the best convergence rate is proposed and is validated with free piezoeceramic actuators. The validated model is then utilized to study the impact of actuator shape and adhesive bondline effect to the wave amplitude. The study shows that simplified analytical equations do not predict the optimal excitation frequencies for all piezoceramic designs accurately.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.355-374
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• 2016

This paper presents and compares a one-dimensional (1D) bending theory for piezoelectric thin beam-type structures with resistive-inductive electrodes to ANSYS$^{(R)}$ three-dimensional (3D) finite element (FE) analysis. In particular, the lateral deflections and vibrations of slender piezoelectric beams are considered. The peculiarity of the piezoelectric beam model is the modeling of electrodes in such a manner that is does not fulfill the equipotential area condition. The case of ideal, perfectly conductive electrodes is a special case of our 1D model. Two-coupled partial differential equations are obtained for the lateral deflection and for the voltage distribution along the electrodes: the first one is an extended Bernoulli-Euler beam equation (second-order in time, forth order in space) and the second one the so-called Telegrapher's equation (second-order in time and space). Analytical results of our theory are validated by 3D electromechanically coupled FE simulations with ANSYS$^{(R)}$. A clamped-hinged beam is considered with various types of electrodes for the piezoelectric layers, which can be either resistive and/or inductive. A natural frequency analysis as well as quasi-static and dynamic simulations are performed. A good agreement between the extended beam theory and the FE results is found. Finally, the practical relevance of this type of electrodes is shown. It is found that the damping capability of properly tuned resistive or resistive-inductive electrodes exceeds the damping performance of beams, where the electrodes are simply linked to an optimized impedance.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.12 no.5
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• pp.501-521
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• 2013

This paper is concerned with static and dynamic shape control of a laminated Bernoulli-Euler beam hosting a uniformly distributed array of resistively interconnected piezoelectric patches. We present an analytical one-dimensional model for a laminated piezoelectric beam with material discontinuities within the framework of Bernoulli-Euler and extent the model by a network of resistors which are connected to several piezoelectric patch actuators. The voltage of only one piezoelectric patch is prescribed: we answer the question how to design the interconnected resistive electric network in order to annihilate lateral vibrations of a cantilever. As a practical example, a cantilever with eight patch actuators under the influence of a tip-force is studied. It is found that the deflection at eight arbitrary points along the beam axis may be controlled independently, if the local action of the piezoelectric patches is equal in magnitude, but opposite in sign, to the external load. This is achieved by the proper design of the resistive network and a suitable choice of the input voltage signal. The validity of our method is exact in the static case for a Bernoulli-Euler beam, but it also gives satisfactory results at higher frequencies and for transient excitations. As long as a certain non-dimensional parameter, involving the number of the piezoelectric patches, the sum of the resistances in the electric network and the excitation frequency, is small, the proposed shape control method is approximately fulfilled for dynamic load excitations. We evaluate the feasibility of the proposed shape control method with a more refined model, by comparing the results of our one-dimensional calculations based on the extended Bernoulli-Euler equations to three-dimensional electromechanically coupled finite element results in ANSYS 12.0. The results with the simple Bernoulli-Euler model agree well with the three-dimensional finite element results.