Piezoelectric Harvester — Two-Mode Beam Profile

A piezoelectric energy harvester is a small cantilever beam — clamped at one end, carrying a PZT (lead zirconate titanate) patch near the root — that flexes when its base is shaken, converting mechanical strain into electrical charge. Real cantilevers are continuous elastic structures with infinitely many bending modes, not a single point mass on a spring: this 2D simulator keeps the first two Euler-Bernoulli mode shapes of the beam, each independently driven and each coupled to the same shared electrode, and numerically integrates their coupled electromechanical equations of motion. The result is a genuinely richer picture than a single-degree-of-freedom model can give — two separate resonance peaks in the frequency response, and, near the second peak, a beam profile with a real internal node where the two halves of the beam move in opposite directions. Sweep the drive frequency, base acceleration, load resistance and damping to see how tip deflection, output voltage and delivered power respond, and use the snap buttons to jump straight to either resonance.