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Indexed by:Journal Papers

Date of Publication:2019-12-15

Journal:COMPOSITE STRUCTURES

Included Journals:EI、SCIE

Volume:230

ISSN No.:0263-8223

Key Words:Piezoelectric structures; Functionally graded materials; Element differential method; Strong formulation-based technique; Point collocation method

Abstract:This paper makes an attempt to develop a new numerical method named piezoelectric element differential method to simulate electro-mechanical behaviors of piezoelectric structures with functionally graded material properties. In doing so, the isoparametric elements which are generally used in finite element method are utilized to discretize the piezoelectric structures. Moreover, the spatial partial derivatives of the displacements and electric potentials are evaluated based on the isoparametric elements, where the first two order derivatives of the shape functions to global coordinates are analytically derived. Furthermore, the system of equations is directly constructed by collocating the governing equations of piezoelectricity at those nodes distributed inside the elements, and forcing the equilibrium conditions of the traction and electric charge as well as the prescribed boundary conditions to be satisfied at the other nodes of the elements. Therefore, the piezoelectric element differential method is an accurate strong formulation-based technique like those collocation methods. At the same time, the method can take the advantages from the standard finite element method for its adaptability to generate meshes for arbitrary configuration. Several numerical examples with piezoelectric structures based on different material properties are performed. The results indicated the proposed method can achieve high accuracy and reliability.