On the manifestation and influence of material nonlinearity in electroelastic power generators
We investigate and model observed nonlinear piezoelectric response of an electroelastic energy harvester. The model employed is a simplified version of the fully nonlinear model proposed by Stanton and Mann [1] since the mechanical oscillations of the experimental device remain in the geometrically linear regime. However, we include quadratic damping due to the appearance of even superharmonics in experimental data as well as suppressed frequency response. Nonlinear coefficients are identified via a nonlinear least squares optimization algorithm that utilizes an approximate analytic solution obtained by the method of harmonic balance. For PZT-5H, we obtained a fourth order elastic tensor component of cp1111 = -8.2515×1015 N/m2 and a fourth order electroelastic tensor value of e3111 = 9.6816×107m/V. Copyright © 2010 by ASME.
