International Journal of Aerospace and Lightweight Structures

doi: 10.3850/S2010428614000063

Assessment of Induced Potential Effects on the Performance of Piezoelectric Beam Finite Elements

Litesh N. Sulbhewar^a and P. Raveendranath^b Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala 695547, India. ^aliteshsulbhewar@gmail.com ^braveendranath@iist.ac.in

ABSTRACT

The effect of induced potential on the accuracy of finite elements to predict behaviour of piezoelectric extension mode smart beam structures is investigated with the help of the sublayered finite element modeling presented here. In most of the general finite element formulations available in literature, through-thickness potential distribution is assumed to be linear which is actually nonlinear by virtue of induced potential. A comparative study carried out in this paper proves that the errors due to the linear assumption of through-thickness potential are significant especially when a piezoelectric material dominates the structure configuration. It is shown that in general linear assumption, a sublayered modeling of the piezoelectric layer in the transverse direction is essential to take care of the induced potential effects and to extract accurate results. The results are compared for various levels of subdivision of the piezoelectric layer in Higher-order Shear Deformation Theory (HSDT) based finite element modeling and ANSYS 2D finite element simulations.

Keywords: Induced potential, Finite element, Piezoelectric.

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