LGEF INSA Lyon

INSA de Lyon is a high-grade public engineering school preparing highly technically skilled professionals for various fields of industry. LGEF is part of the 21 research facilities hosted by the institute. The laboratory is devoted to the development of electroactive smart materials and their applications. Scientific production is more than 25 papers per year and 10 patents since 2000. The lab experience covers material aspects (development of electrostrictive materials, and previously development of piezoceramics and high performance piezoelectric single crystals) as well as applications of active materials (piezoelectric, pyroelectric, electrostrictive, magnetoelectrics…) covering four specific areas, including energy harvesting devices and self-powered systems. In particular, LGEF developed an innovative energy harvesting technique – known a Synchronized Switch Harvesting (SSH) – which is one of the most efficient techniques to optimize energy conversion from vibrations using piezoceramics. LGEF expertise covers energy harvesting principle development and modelling as well as off-the-shelf electronic design, power flow management and validation experiments.

LGEF INSA will be in charge of the development of the electromechanical model, the nonlinear electrical interface and be an active partner for the experimental aspect.

Key persons involved in the project (>30%):

Dr. Mickaël Lallart (French coordinator) graduated from Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon (INSA Lyon), Lyon, France, in electrical engineering in 2006, and received his PhD in electronics, electrotechnics, and automatics from the same university in 2008, where he worked for the Laboratoire de Génie Électrique et Ferroélectricité (LGEF) in the framework of the ADVICE FP7 project. After working as a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Intelligent Material Systems and Structures (CIMSS) in Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA in 2009, Dr. Lallart has been hired as an associate professor in the LGEF. His current field of interest focuses the modeling of electroactive materials such as piezoelectrics, pyroelectrics or electrostrictive polymers, as well as their application for vibration damping, energy harvesting and Structural Health Monitoring, as well as autonomous, self-powered wireless systems. Dr. Lallart was part of numerous ANR projects (Napoleco, Piezo2Power…) in which he was responsible of several Work Packages.

Exemple of a self-powered SHM system developed in LGEF (Petit et al., 2006; Guyomar et al., 2007; Lallart et al., 2008)