Analytical modeling of sandwich beam for piezoelectric bender elements

Piezoelectric bender elements are widely used as electromechanical sensors and actuators.An analytical sandwich beam model for piezoelectric bender elements was developed based on the first-order shear deformation theory(FSDT),which assumes a single rotation angle for the whole cross-section and a quadratic distribution function for coupled electric potential in piezoelectric layers,and corrects the effect of transverse shear strain on the electric displacement integration.Free vibration analysis of simply- supported bender elements was carried out and the numerical results showed that,solu- tions of the present model for various thickness-to-length ratios are compared well with the exact two-dimensional solutions,which presents an efficient and accurate model for analyzing dynamic electromechanical responses of bender elements.