Abstract
Sensors and actuators based on piezoelectric plates have shown increasing demand in the field of smart structures, including the development of actuators for cooling and fluid pumping applications and transducers for novel energy harvesting devices. This project involves the development of a finite element and topology optimization software to design piezoelectric sensors, actuators and energy harvesting devices by distributing piezoelectric material over a metallic plate in order to achieve a desired dynamic behavior with specified vibration frequencies. The finite element employs a general formulation capable of representing both direct and converse piezoelectric effects. It is based on the MITC formulation, which is reliable, efficient and avoids the shear locking problem. The topology optimization formulation is based on the PEMAP-P model (Piezoelectric Material with Penalization and Polarization), where the design variables are the pseudo-densities that describe the amount of piezoelectric material at each finite element. The optimization problem has a multi-objective function, which can be subdivided into three distinct problems: maximization of mean transduction, minimization of mean compliance and optimization of Eigenvalues. The first one is responsible for maximizing the amount of electric energy converted into elastic energy, the second one guarantees that the structure does not become excessively flexible and the third one tunes the structure for a given frequency. This paper presents the implementation of the finite element and optimization software and shows preliminary results achieved.
Published Version
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