Experimental verification of tire energy harvester designed via reliability based design optimization method

In this paper a piezoelectric energy harvester for scavenging wasted vibration energy inside a vehicle tire is designed and its performance is experimentally verified. Piezoelectric type energy harvesters can be used to collect vibrational energy and power such systems, but they need to be carefully designed to address power generation and durability performances. In this study, we address a reliability based design optimization (RBDO) approach to design the harvester that considers the uncertainty in dimensional tolerances and material properties, to be compared to the traditional deterministic design optimization (DDO). Both designs are manufactured for the experimental evaluation to demonstrate the merits of RBDO design over DDO.