Dr. Heonjun Yoon from the Laboratory for System Health and Risk Management (Director: Prof. Byeng Dong Youn) at Seoul National University’s Dept. of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering received the 2018 Young Scientist Award from Asian Congress of Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization (ACSMO). The conference was held in Dalian, China from May 21 to 24. Nominees were selected among the submitted papers, based on the creativity and quality of the research. After the final presentation, Dr. Heonjun Yoon was chosen as the winner.

Piezoelectric energy harvesting is a technology that transforms the leftover vibrational energy into electricity using the piezoelectric effect, which refers to the producing of a potential difference when the material is under mechanical stress. In the presentation, Dr. Yoon observed the fact that the electricity-elasticity ductility coefficient of a piezoelectric wafer with vertical transverse isotropy is deeply related to the Laplace operator of the displacement field, and proved for the first time in the world that harvestable power increases when piezoelectric wafer is attached to the auxetic metamaterial with a negative Poisson’s ratio. In addition, he suggested an optimum design algorithm for maximum performance of piezoelectric energy harvesting, tackling spatial uncertainties that inherently exist in auxetic metamaterials.<?xml:namespace prefix = "o" ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />