Parametric study and shape optimization of Piezoelectric Energy Harvesters by isogeometric analysis and kriging metamodeling

Abstract

Piezo-electric energy harvesters (PEHs) are widely used to recycle waste vibrations for pow-ering small electronic devices. In this work, the performance of PEHs of non-conventional shapes is studied with the aim to optimize their design. A PEH is modeled as a bimorph can-tilever Kirchhoff-Love plate subjected to base acceleration. The shape is described by Non Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS), and the problem is solved by the isogeometric analy-sis (IGA). Accuracy of the IGA solutions is demonstrated on two benchmark problems. Then, we conduct a parametric study to investigate the effect of shape perturbations on the funda-mental frequency, the peak amplitude of the frequency response function (FRF) and the peak amplitude of the FRF per unit of area. Next, we build the Kriging meta-model to obtain the boundary shapes that maximize the peak amplitude of the FRF and the peak amplitude of the FRF per unit of area for a target frequency. The optimization is performed for three cases: with a fixed tip mass, without a tip mass and with a tip mass being one of the design parameters.