Experimentally Modelling a Piezoelectric Glued Laminated Plate Energy of Harvester

The effects of glue layers are regarded as the stiffness and damping of laminated circular plates. An energy harvester consisting of a concentrated mass and a piezoelectric laminated circular plate is investigated with the account for the glue layers.

The resonant amplitudes and frequencies are determined via the frequency sweep experiments. To account the adhesive effects, the force surface method is employed to identify the restoring and damping force of the glued laminated plate in a simplified one and half degree-of-freedom system, and the resulting force is fitted by a combination of hyperbolic tangent and trigonometric functions. The model with the nonlinear restoring and damping force is analyzed via the harmonic balance method. The outcomes of the voltage-frequency response curves are supported by the experiment results.

The results show that only under small excitation the frequencies can be well predicted by the plate theory model without the glue layers and the differences increase with the excitation. The investigation reveals that the glue layers change mainly the stiffness rather than the damping.

The model with the nonlinear restoring and damping force can predict the fundamental resonant amplitudes and frequencies measured by experiments well.