Design under uncertainty for reliable power generation of piezoelectric energy harvester

In recent years, vibration energy harvesters have been widely studied to build self-powered wireless sensor networks for monitoring modern engineered systems. Although there has been significant research effort on different energy harvester configurations, the power output of a vibration energy harvester is known to be sensitive to various sources of uncertainties such as material properties, geometric tolerances, and operating conditions. This article proposes a reliability-based design optimization method to find an optimum design of energy harvester that satisfies the target reliability on power generation. This optimum design of vibration energy harvester demonstrates reliable power generation capability in the presence of the various sources of uncertainties.