  Flexible piezoelectric devices made of polymeric materials are widely used
for micro- and nano-electro-mechanical systems. In particular, numerous recent
applications concern energy harvesting. Due to the importance of computational
modeling to understand the influence that microscale geometry and constitutive
variables exert on the macroscopic behavior, a numerical approach is developed
here for multiscale and multiphysics modeling of thin piezoelectric sheets made
of aligned arrays of polymeric nanofibers, manufactured by electrospinning. At
the microscale, the representative volume element consists in piezoelectric
polymeric nanofibers, assumed to feature a piezoelastic behavior and subjected
to electromechanical contact constraints. The latter are incorporated into the
virtual work equations by formulating suitable electric, mechanical and
coupling potentials and the constraints are enforced by using the penalty
method. From the solution of the micro-scale boundary value problem, a suitable
scale transition procedure leads to identifying the performance of a
macroscopic thin piezoelectric shell element.

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science