The small amount of power demanded by many present-day electronic devices, opens the possibility to convert part of the energy present in the environment into electrical energy, using several methods. One of such methods is to use piezoelectric film bending beams inside the shoe, and use part of the mechanical energy employed during normal walking activity. This work analyzes several bending be...

An innovative actuation principle is introduced in this paper to drive a rotary motor using an anisotropic piezoelectric composite laminate. The driving element is a three layer laminated beam with piezoceramics sandwiched between two anti-symmetric composite laminae. By taking advantage of material anisotropy, torsional motion can be induced from in-plane strain actuation. With such structural...

In this study, Analytical work is carried out for static shape control of cantilever beam structure with a use of laminated piezoelectric actuator (LPA). The mathematical modeling of beam element covered with LPA based on Timoshenko beam element theory and linear theory of piezoelectricity has been used. This work shows how number of actuators, actuator size, actuator location on beam and contr...

This paper is concerned with the development of new simple 4-noded locking-alleviated smart finite elements for modeling the smart composite beams. The exact solutions for the static responses of the overall smart composite beams are also derived for authenticating the new smart finite elements. The overall smart composite beam is composed of a laminated substrate conventional composite beam, a...

The potential of piezoelectric ceramics on repair of delaminated structures subjected to a static loading is researched in the letter. A sliding fracture mode on two tips of a delaminated beam structure was uncovered by the author in a previous report. The stress singularity due to the fracture mode at the tips is attempted to be mended with a pair of piezoelectric patches by virtue of their el...

The active vibration suppression of a single flexible link manipulator using a piezoelectric actuator is investigated. For this purpose, a finite element (FE) model is developed for the modal and transient analysis of a cantilever beam and a flexible link manipulator. A proportional control strategy is employed in a FE model to adjust the voltage applied to the piezoelectric actuator so as to c...

The use of PSpice models for piezoelectric devices and ultrasonic transmission media is of major importance when designing electronics for ultrasonic systems. Today, these models include viscoelastic loss but disregard loss due to diffraction, i.e. beam spreading. This paper presents a method for the inclusion of diffraction loss in PSpice simulations of ultrasonic systems. The conductive loss ...

Piezoelectric materials have received considerable attention from the smart structure community because of their potential use as sensors, actuators and power harvesters. In particular, polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) has been proposed in recent years as an enabling material for a variety of sensing and energy harvesting applications. In this study, carbon nanotubes (CNT) are included within a P...

A design optimization based on genetic algorithms for increasing power output performance of MEMS piezoelectric cantilevered energy harvesters has been performed. By employing genetic algorithms, the piezoelectric energy scavenging system with optimized shape and lateral geometries of a unimorph cantilever beam and a proof mass is simulated to achieve a power response improvement of ~1.8× in co...

Self-sensing techniques for atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilevers have several advantageous characteristics compared to the optical beam deflection method. The possibility of down scaling, parallelization of cantilever arrays and the absence of optical interference associated imaging artifacts have led to an increased research interest in these methods. However, for multifrequency AFM, the ...