Miniaturised energy converters

Recent German demographics shows that 21% of the total population are older than 65 years. This number is predicted to increase to over 30% by year of 2050. The increasing number of elderly people together with the increasing life expectancy motivates the development of implantable medical devices (IMD). A key challenge for these IMDs is their limited battery capacity. It is essential to develop an alternative energy supply mechanism for the IMDs.

Energy harvesting technologies have attracted considerable attention in the past decade. Various applications exist together with dedicated energy harvesters to address the growing demand of ubiquitous electronic systems. Miniaturized energy harvesters, which integrated in the medical devices shall support the battery, and thus prolong the implant's lifetime. 

This proposal examines the piezoelectric energy harvester, which harvests wasted mechanical vibration energy, and the thermoelectric generator, which harvests thermal energy from the human body. Computer-aided development processes have become the state of the art for designing and optimising these energy harvesters due to their low cost and high efficiency. However, the capacity of today’s computers is not always sufficient to meet the demands of industrial simulations. The complex geometry and multi-physics effects in energy harvesting devices have resulted in rather time-consuming simulations. To improve the efficiency of simulations using existing computers, model order reduction (MOR) and parametric model order reduction (pMOR) methods are applied to generate reduced-order models, which ensure computational efficiency, for example, for system-level simulations by replacing the original full-scale model with a reduced yet still accurate surrogate.