Reliability risk analysis for the aeroelastic piezoelectric energy harvesters

Piezoelectric materials have a capability to absorb energy from surroundings and transform it into electrical energy. Energy harvesting is an absolute task in the aerospace industry to drive wireless sensors. In this paper, multi-state reliability risk assessment based on importance measures for aeroelastic piezoelectric energy harvesters (APEH) is carried out. The risk assessment evaluates the system based on its different states of operation and enables a reliability risk analyst to access dynamically the risk associated with the components of the system. A multi-state importance measures based APEH risk assessment system is not just capable of evaluating the risk at system, subsystem and component level but also takes into account the relative states of the system, subsystem and components. The proposed risk assessment gives a relative importance factor to each input thus identifying the most important subsystem for the system and most important component to the subsystem. Such risk results can be very useful for the maintenance engineers and risk analyst of the aerospace industry so that the respective maintenance actions can be made more targeted and proactively anticipated. The results indicate the proposed methodology to be highly effective and efficient.