Modeling of Piezoelectric Energy Harvester: A Comparison Between Euler-Bernoulli Theory and Timoshenko Theory

Abstract

Harvesting vibration energy using piezoelectric materials has gained considerable attention over the past few years. Typically, a piezoelectric energy harvester is a unimorph or bimorph cantilevered beam which undergoes base vibration. The focus of this paper is to compare the Euler-Bernoulli model and the Timoshenko model, which are both used for modeling the vibration-based energy harvester. Procedures of deriving the electro-mechanical equation of motion are provided, following exact expressions for the electrical output in two models. Parametric case studies are carried out in order to compare the frequency response of two models. Simulation results show that there is a great difference between Euler-Bernoulli model and Timoshenko model at low length-to-thickness aspect ratio. Such difference diminishes and becomes negligible as aspect ratio increases. It is shown that for the design of piezoelectric energy harvester with small aspect ratio, Timoshenko model can be more accurate than Euler-Bernoulli model in predicting the system behavior.