Coupled iterative partitioning analysis for flow-driven piezoelectric energy harvesters

Scavenging of energy from the environment is an important engineering challenge. Recently, many researchers have investigated flow-driven piezoelectric energy harvesters, which harvest electricity from flow-induced vibration via the piezoelectric effect, and have applied them to drive low-power devices. Such harvesting is a complicated multi-physics problem involving fluid-structure interactions, piezoelectricity, and circuit design. The purpose of this study is to model such harvesting in detail and to solve the detailed model by strong coupling approaches. Although a few studies based on monolithic approaches have been recently reported, there is no study based on iterative partitioning approaches, which offer the advantage of allowing the use of existing sub-solvers. The novelty of the present study is to develop the iterative partitioning method-based analysis system. In this paper, we formulate nonlinear equations for flow-driven piezoelectric energy harvesting, of which unknown is structural displacement. We then provide an algorithm based on the iterative partitioning method. The proposed analysis system comprises an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian-based fluid analysis solver, a monolithic structure-piezoelectricity interaction analysis solver, and a circuit analysis solver. Finally, we show the results of two numerical simulations to validate our proposed analysis systems. The first involves an analysis of piezoelectric energy harvesting in the absence of the effects of the surrounding fluid. The second considers flow-driven piezoelectric energy harvesting. The results of both simulations are in good agreement with those reported in previous studies.