We investigate the occurrence of self‐penalization in topology optimization problems for piezoceramic‐mechanical composites. Our main goal is to give physical interpretations for this phenomenon, i.e., to study the question why for various problems intermediate material values are not optimal in the absence of explicit penalization of the pseudo densities. In order to investigate this effect numerical experiments for several static and/or dynamic actuator and sensor objective functions are performed and their respective results are compared. The objective functions are mean transduction, displacement, sound power, electric potential, electric energy, energy conversion and electric power.
