Study of bistability behavior relative to the size of the composite plates

Nowadays, the improvement of the nonlinearity for energy harvesting systems is more and more investigated due to their ability to work for a wider frequency range. For this purpose, in this work, the development of bistable plates is proposed. In particular, the properties of composite bistable boards, built of monolayers of ordered carbon fibers is investigated. This paper proposes a bistable plates, where this effect is introduced during the manufacturing by changing the orientation of individual layers. In particular, the effect of the plate size and thickness on the bistability is studied experimentally. For this purpose, the relationship of the force F relative to x, where x is a measure of the plate deflection relative to the unstable equilibrium point (at plate). Further, the potential energy Ep(x) is evaluated through the numerical integration of the force characteristic to deduce the effect of the studied parameters on the plates bistability.