Melnik, R.V.N.
An increasing interest in smart material and structure technology generated by many industrial applications has put a special emphasis on a better understanding of the dynamical behaviour of piezoelectrics as an integral part of this technology. In some such applications piezoelectric sensors and actuators are used as embedded control elements in advanced composites and smart structures that are subjected to severe mechanical and thermal environments. The influence of thermal effects on the dynamic behaviour of piezoelectrics and the coupling between thermal, mechanical, and electric fields are key issues int he analysis of such structures.
In this paper the influence of coupled thermal and electric fields on mechanical characteristics of piezoceramic-based devices has been analyzed numerically. On the example of axysymmetric oscillations of hollow thin-walled piezoceramic cylinders it is shown that the thermal field can contribute substantially to such important characteristics of devices as radial displacements. The observed effects become increasingly important in such cases where a piezoelectric has to be considered as a part of a smart structure whose response piezoelectric sensors should monitor, or where the piezoelectric-based device is imbedded into an acoustic interacting media. Although technically non-trivial, mathematically it is relatively straightforward to generalize our numerical schemes to these cases.
Key words: dynamic thermoelectroelasticity; coupled multiphysics problems; piezoelectrics; nonlinear effects;smart materials and structures; piezo-sensors/actuators; hollow thin-walled cylinder; oscillations; numerical analysis; coupled fields.