Vibration Analysis of a thin Plate with Piezoelectric Energy Harvester Patch

The study of vibration based energy harvesting using piezoelectric has been considered during the past decade. This type of piezoelectric harvester is an alternative design due to their potential for eliminating the need for batteries inside devices for use in low consumption sensor nodes. In this paper, a Finite Element (FE) electroelastic model of a piezoelectric energy harvester integrated to a thin plate is presented. A commercially available FE software ANSYS is used to model the thin plate with the piezoceramic patch harvester. For this purpose, a thin PZT-5A piezoceramic patch is attached on the surface of a rectangular aluminum plate. It is noted that, the linear behavior for piezoelectric material is considered in constitutive equations. Moreover, the electric resistance and structural damping ratio are also taken into account. The result of steady state solutions for electrical and structural responses are obtained for harmonic force excitation. The solution is verified by an experimental solution performed in the available literature. The effect of various piezoelectric properties and various boundary conditions has been studied on the voltage FRFs output results.