Analysis of heat transfer and flow characteristics of a microcantilever beam for piezoelectric energy harvesting

This investigation is focused on studying the response and the potential applications of a flexible piezoelectric microcantilever to harvest energy and identifies the pertinent parameters that govern its fluttering in a flow. Piezoelectric materials have the capability to absorb the mechanical energy which can be transformed into an electrical energy to power low volt electric devices. The transport governing equations used in this study were solved using a finite element method. For a flexible piezoelectric microcantilever, a fully coupled fluid-structure interaction (FSI) approach was used in this investigation to solve for the fluid and the structure interaction. Results obtained in this study were compared to other analytical results from literature and have shown excellent agreement. The results of this study illustrated a significant effect of the inlet velocity magnitude on the deflection of the beam, output electric, and heat transfer characteristics. Moreover, the results indicated that as the thickness of the piezoelectric material decreases, the electric field increases. Further, the average heat flux is found to increase significantly with an increase in the inlet velocity.