TY - JOUR

T1 - An electro-mechanical dynamic model for flexoelectric energy harvesters

AU - Thai, Tran Quoc

AU - Zhuang, Xiaoying

AU - Rabczuk, Timon

N1 - Funding Information: The authors would like to thank the financial support of ERC Starting Grant (802205) and Heisenberg-Programme from DFG (ZH 459/5-1). The authors would like to thank the financial support of RISE-BESTOFRAC (734379) of Horizon 2020.

PY - 2023/2

Y1 - 2023/2

N2 - Flexoelectricity is a universal electro-mechanical coupling effect that occurs in dielectrics of all symmetric groups and becomes dominant at the micro- and nano-scales. It plays an important role in evaluating micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) such as energy harvesters which convert vibrational energy to electric energy. At finer length scales, micro-inertia effects significantly contribute to the behavior of flexoelectric materials due to the mechanical dispersion. Hence, to properly characterize the vibrational behavior of MEMS, a reliable theoretical approach is required accounting for all possible phenomena that affect the output of the system such as voltage or power density. In this work, we present a consistent (dynamic) model and associated computational framework for flexoelectric structures to study the characteristics of the vibrational behavior of energy harvesters showing the dominance of the flexoelectric effect at micro- and nano-scales. In this context, we quantify the impact of the micro-inertia length scale and the flexoelectric dynamic parameter on both frequency and time responses of energy harvesters.

AB - Flexoelectricity is a universal electro-mechanical coupling effect that occurs in dielectrics of all symmetric groups and becomes dominant at the micro- and nano-scales. It plays an important role in evaluating micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) such as energy harvesters which convert vibrational energy to electric energy. At finer length scales, micro-inertia effects significantly contribute to the behavior of flexoelectric materials due to the mechanical dispersion. Hence, to properly characterize the vibrational behavior of MEMS, a reliable theoretical approach is required accounting for all possible phenomena that affect the output of the system such as voltage or power density. In this work, we present a consistent (dynamic) model and associated computational framework for flexoelectric structures to study the characteristics of the vibrational behavior of energy harvesters showing the dominance of the flexoelectric effect at micro- and nano-scales. In this context, we quantify the impact of the micro-inertia length scale and the flexoelectric dynamic parameter on both frequency and time responses of energy harvesters.

KW - Cubic Perovskite

KW - Dynamic flexoelectric effect

KW - Energy harvesting

KW - Large rotation/geometric nonlinearity

KW - Micro inertial effect

KW - Size dependent piezoelectricity/flexoelectricity

KW - Strain gradient elasticity/couple stress theory

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139627722&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/s11071-022-07928-z

DO - 10.1007/s11071-022-07928-z

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85139627722

VL - 111

SP - 2183

EP - 2202

JO - Nonlinear dynamics

JF - Nonlinear dynamics

SN - 0924-090X

IS - 3

ER -