Reliability-based design optimization of a road energy harvester housing for bimodal axle load distribution

Abstract

The structural safety and reliability of a road energy harvester housing is an essential design requirement to generate sustainable energy through a road energy harvesting system. The overdesign of the housing, however, decreases drastically the harvesting efficiency because the harvester produces the electrical energy proportional to the mechanical input displacement. Therefore, the reliability of the housing should be accurately calculated based on axle load data of vehicles during the design process. In this paper, an identification method for bimodal probability distribution using grouped data of axle load is proposed. Then the reliability-based design optimization using Akaike information criterion for bimodal distribution is applied to the road energy harvester housing. The results are compared with other reliability methods and the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method are demonstrated.