A cantilever piezoelectric energy harvester (PEH) is a popular choice to harvest energy for applications with natural or unnatural vibrations. Other than the choice of piezoelectric material, the substrate layer material also plays an important role to increase the energy harvesting in PEH. Earlier researches have emphasized on selecting a few substrate materials than all available in literature. However, we argue that the choice of the substrate material and its mechanical properties depend on the design of the PEH. We establish this fact by designing 20 different PEH models by varying the size of cantilever, substrate layer thickness, and types of the piezoelectric materials. These models are simulated in COMSOL with every known substrate material to select the best substrate material. We also propose a greedy approach to further increase the energy harvesting by optimizing the mechanical properties of the best substrate material. In all models, the best substrate material harvests at least 2 × more energy. The greedy approach increases energy harvesting in almost 50% of the models. Some of the substrate materials with optimized mechanical properties are reported in literature, however, this research opens up a discussion to manufacture new substrate materials to increase energy harvesting in PEH.

中文翻译：

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压电悬臂式能量收集系统衬底层材料及其力学性能优化

悬臂式压电能量收集器 (PEH) 是为具有自然或非自然振动的应用收集能量的流行选择。除了压电材料的选择外，基底层材料对于增加 PEH 中的能量收集也起着重要作用。早期的研究强调选择比文献中所有可用的少数基材材料。然而，我们认为基材材料的选择及其机械性能取决于 PEH 的设计。我们通过改变悬臂的尺寸、基板层厚度和压电材料的类型来设计 20 种不同的 PEH 模型，从而确立了这一事实。这些模型在 COMSOL 中使用每种已知的基板材料进行仿真，以选择最佳基板材料。我们还提出了一种贪婪的方法，通过优化最佳基板材料的机械性能来进一步增加能量收集。在所有模型中，最好的基板材料至少能获得 2 倍以上的能量。贪婪方法在近 50% 的模型中增加了能量收集。一些具有优化机械性能的基板材料在文献中有所报道，然而，这项研究开启了制造新基板材料以增加 PEH 能量收集的讨论。