Mean Transduction

In 1999, Silva et al. introduced in

Silva, Nishiwaki, Kikuchi; Design of piezocomposite materials and piezoelectric transducers using topology optimization—Part II; Archives of Computational Methods in Engineering; 1999


the objective function mean transduction. It describes the piezoelectric coupling, and it is quite intuitive to maximize that coupling. The mean transduction was applied quite often by Silva. To my knowledge there are no recent publications, where it is used, but I might be wrong.

I don't use the function but as I started 4 years ago with it, it is still in my mind and somehow I still try to actually understand it properly.

I make currently good progress in writing my thesis and just work on a section about mean transduction. I finally found the link between mean transduction and classical adjoint based sensitivy analysis - which clearly helps in understanding the nature of the mean transduction. Just, I don't know if this is of interest, as I don't know, if the mean transduction is used any more. For sensor applications, maximizing the electric power as done by Cory Rupp is IMHO more practical - and for actor applications the physics might be necessary, e.g. acoustic formulations to prevent acoustic short circuits as I have shown.

This piezo stuff is really heavy (optimization) stuff :)