Purpose <p>Smart composites have enormous applicability potential for designing energy harvesters. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of the harvester using three different composites embedded with PZT patch.</p> Methods <p>The finite element approach is utilized to evaluate the harvester’s frequency and strain. The enhancement in the harvester beam is achieved through the maximization in strain and minimization in natural frequency via the numerical simulation. The Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) is implemented to obtain the optimal strain and natural frequency of the smart composite beam. The ply orientation and the lamina thickness are the design variables; the optimization is constrained to limit the resonant frequency to be less than the initial model.</p> Results <p>The numerical models of the composite and the harvester beam formulations are validated with the available resultsin the literature. The analysis shows that the optimal design could reduce the frequency by 45.71% from the initial results, along with a 54.74% increase in the voltage generation under the same loading conditions. In line with this, the numerical simulation shows that the power density of the optimized model has a 60% higher value than the initial model.</p> Conclusion <p>By altering the ply orientation and thickness of the lamina, this numerically optimized study showed that the smart composite beam can generate high voltage output and operate at low frequency without adding any additional tip mass.</p> Graphical Abstract <p></p>