Modeling of smart composites controlled by thin piezoelectric fibers

摘要

Recently, thin piezoelecttric fibers with diameters between 10 mu m and 30 mu m have been manufactured and used as sensor/actuator components of s mart composite structures. The paper deals with the mathematical analysis, humerical simulation and optimeal design of smart structures controlled by such thin piezoelectric fibers, where two different approaches are investigated. At first a smeared concept is applied. Each active layer consisting of piezoelectric fibers embedded in a matrix material is modeled as an anisotropic coupled electro-mechanical continuum and analyzed by recently developed special finite shell elements. At second a discrete concept is used, where the piezelectric fibers are modeled as one-dimensional truss like finitie elements which are embedded into conventional finite elements by a penality technique. These two approaches are disussed and compared.