Optimal design of piezoelectric transducers

Piezoelectric devices have become of common use in many engineering applications nowadays, being its design and optimization a very challenging matter.

Piezoelectric materials are those having the ability to convert electrical energy into mechanical one, and vice versa. Often surface bonded to structures, they are commonly used for sensing, acting and even for reducing noise and structural vibrations as part of active control systems. The word transducer comprises both sensor and actuator terms. To get the desired effect, tailor-made electrodes are shaped in a proper way, and here is where topology optimization makes the difference. More specifically, the use of this technique permits to design transducers with promising applications at the micro scale that may go from providing therapeutic stimulations through the skin as bio-patches to sensing very fine characteristics as bio-sensors.

The group has a long experience in this area, especially in the optimal design of modal transducers (those that isolate a particular mode of a structure while remaining insensitive to the non-targeted modes), and our actual challenge is the design under hyperelasticity laws, as required for the modern piezoelectric polymers.