Geometric nonlinear formulation for thermal-rigid-flexible coupling system

This paper develops geometric nonlinear hybrid formulation for flexible multibody system with large deformation considering thermal efect. Diferent from the conventional formulation, the heat flux is the function of the rotational angle and the elastic deformation, therefore, the coupling among the temperature, the large overall motion and the elastic deformation should be taken into account. Firstly,based on nonlinear strain–displacement relationship, variational dynamic equations and heat conduction equations for a flexible beam are derived by using virtual work approach,and then, Lagrange dynamics equations and heat conduction equations of the first kind of the flexible multibody system are obtained by leading into the vectors of Lagrange multiplier associated with kinematic and temperature constraint equations. This formulation is used to simulate the thermal included hub-beam system. Comparison of the response between the coupled system and the uncoupled system has revealed the thermal chattering phenomenon. Then, the key parameters for stability, including the moment of inertia of the central body, the incident angle, the damping ratio and the response time ratio, are analyzed. This formulation is also used to simulate a three-link system applied with heat flux. Comparison of the results obtained by the proposed formulation with those obtained by the approximate nonlinear model and the linear model shows the significance of considering all the nonlinear terms in the strain in case of large deformation. At last, applicability of the approximate nonlinear model and the linear model are clarified in detail.     

Research on nonlinear vibration control of laminated cylindrical shells with discontinuous piezoelectric layer

Nonlinear Dynamics - A model of laminated cylindrical shells with discontinuous piezoelectric layer is proposed. Based on the first-order shear nonlinear shell theory, the nonlinear vibration...     

A new two-dimensional model for electro-mechanical response of thick laminated piezoelectric actuator

This paper investigates the electro-mechanical behaviour of a thick, laminated actuator with piezoelectric and isotropic lamina under externally applied electric loading using a new two-dimensional computational model. The elastic core is relatively thick and thus it is modelled by Timoshenko thick-beam theory. Although the piezoelectric lamina is a beam-like layer, it is formulated via a two-dimensional model because of not only the strong electro-mechanical coupling, but also of the presence of a two-dimensional electric field. It is shown in this paper that a one-dimensional model for the piezoelectric beam-like layer is inadequate. The piezoelectric model is constructed within the scope of linear piezoelectricity. The actuation response is induced through the application of external electric voltage. Under the strong coupling of elasticity and electricity, the strain energy and work of electric potential are presented. The electro-mechanical response of the laminated Timoshenko beam is formulated and determined via a variational energy principle. Numerical examples presented illustrate convincing comparison with finite element solutions and existing published data. New numerical solutions are also presented to investigate the geometric effect on the electro-mechanical bending behaviour.     

Effects of nonlinear piezoelectric coupling on energy harvesters under direct excitation

A nonlinear analysis of an energy harvester consisting of a multilayered cantilever beam with a tip mass is performed. The model takes into account geometric, inertia, and piezoelectric nonlinearities. A combination of the Galerkin technique, the extended Hamilton principle, and the Gauss law is used to derive a reduced-order model of the harvester. The method of multiple scales is used to determine analytical expressions for the tip deflection, output voltage, and harvested power near the first global natural frequency. The results show that one- or two-mode approximations are not sufficient to produce accurate estimates of the voltage and harvested power. A parametric study is performed to investigate the effects of the nonlinear piezoelectric coefficients and the excitation amplitude on the system response. The effective nonlinearity may be of the hardening or softening type, depending on the relative magnitudes of the different nonlinearities.     

A general nonlinear theory of elastic shells

This paper presents a general nonlinear theory of elastic shells for large deflections and finite strains in reference to a certain natural state. By expanding the displacement components into power series in the coordinate θ³ normal to the undeformed middle surface of shells, the expansions of the Cauchy-Green strain tensors are expressed in terms of these expanded displacement components. Through the modified Hellinger-Reissner variational principle for a three-dimensional elastic continuum, a set of the fundamental shell equations is derived in terms of the expanded Cauchy-Green strain tensors and Kirchhoff stress resultants. The Love-Kirchhoff hypothesis is not assumed and higher order stretching and bending are taken into consideration. For elastic shells of isotropic materials, assuming the strain-energy to be an analytic function of the strain measures, general nonlinear constitutive equations are then derived. Thus, a complete and consistent two-dimensional shell theory incorporating the geometrical and physical nonlinearities is established. The classical theories of shells are directly derivable from the present results by proper truncations of the series.     

Analysis of laminated piezoelectric cylindrical shells

A new method is developed for three-dimensional stress analysis of laminated piezoelectric cylindrical shell with simple support. The shell can be subjected to various applied loadings, including distributed body force, inner and outer surface traction and potential. Each layer of the shell can be piezoelectric or elastic/dielectric, with perfect bonding assumed between each interface. The governing equations are solved by the state-space technique. Numerical results are presented to show the sensing and actuating effects of three-layered piezoelectric cylindrical shell. The project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (19572027)     

Transient response of a cracked piezoelectric strip under arbitrary electro-mechanical impact

By using the well-developed integral transform methodology, the dynamic response of stress and electric displacement around a finite crack in an infinite piezoelectric strip are investigated under arbitrary dynamic anti-plane loads. The dynamic stress intensity factors and electric displacement are obtained analytically. It is shown that the dynamic crack-tip stress and electric field still have a square-root singularity. Numerical computations for the dynamic stress intensity factor show that the electric load has a significant influence on the dynamic response of stress field. The higher the ratio of the crack length to the width of the strip, the higher the peak value of the dynamic stress intensity factor is. On the other hand, the dynamic response of the electric field is determined solely by the applied electric load. The electric field will promote or retard the propagation of the crack depending on the time elapse since the application of the external electro-mechanical loads. The project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Post-Doctor Science Foundation of China     

Postbuckling analysis of axially-loaded laminated cylindrical shells with piezoelectric actuators

A compressive postbuckling analysis is presented for a laminated cylindrical shell with piezoelectric actuators subjected to the combined action of mechanical, electric and thermal loads. The temperature field considered is assumed to be a uniform distribution over the shell surface and through the shell thickness, and the electric field is assumed to be the transverse component E_Z only. The material properties are assumed to be independent of the temperature and the electric field. The governing equations are based on the classical shell theory with von Kármán–Donnell-type kinematic nonlinearity. The nonlinear prebuckling deformations and initial geometric imperfections of the shell are both taken into account. A boundary layer theory of shell buckling, which includes the effects of nonlinear prebuckling deformations, large deflections in the postbuckling range, and initial geometric imperfections of the shell, is extended to the case of hybrid laminated cylindrical shells. A singular perturbation technique is employed to determine the buckling loads and postbuckling equilibrium paths. The numerical illustrations concern the compressive postbuckling behavior of perfect and imperfect, cross-ply laminated cylindrical thin shells with fully covered or embedded piezoelectric actuators under different sets of thermal and electric loading conditions. The effects played by temperature rise, applied voltage, shell geometric parameter, stacking sequence, as well as initial geometric imperfections are studied.     

A two-dimensional theory for piezoelectric layers used in electro-mechanical transducers—I : Derivation

An Nth order two-dimensional theory is derived for strongly coupled piezoelectric layers that is suitable for use in analyzing electro-mechanical transducer response in circumstances where the field variations over the transducer face are important. Specific formulae are given for the widely used ceramic PZT-5.The first few branches of the dispersion curves for PZT-5 are obtained numerically for both the three-dimensional theory and the approximate two-dimensional theory. The correspondence of these curves at long wavelengths is used to determine a single correction factor. The face boundary conditions accommodate unknown traction and voltage so that the theory can be used in transducer applications.     

Analysis of piezoelectric ceramic multilayer actuators based on an electro-mechanical coupled meshless method

This paper presents an efficient meshless method for analyzing cracked piezoelectric structures subjected to mechanical and electrical loading. In this method, an element free Galerkin (EFG) formulation, an enriched basic function and some special shape functions that contain discontinuous derivatives are employed. Based on the moving least squares (MLS) interpolation approach, the EFG method is one of the promising methods for dealing with problems involving progressive crack growth. Since the method is meshless and no element connectivity data are needed, the burdensome remeshing procedure required in the conventional finite element method (FEM) is avoided. The numerical results show that the proposed method can yield an accurate near-tip stress field in an infinite piezoelectric plate containing an interior hole. In another example studying a ceramic multilayer actuator, the proposed model was found to be accurate in the simulation of stress and electric field concentrations arround the abrupt end of an internal electrode. The project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10025209, 10132010, and 90208002), and the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (HKU 7203/03E). The English text was polished by Yunming Chen.     

Phenomenological invariants and their application to geometrically nonlinear formulation of triangular finite elements of shear deformable shells

A phenomenological definition of classical invariants of strain and stress tensors is considered. Based on this definition, the strain and stress invariants of a shell obeying the assumptions of the Reissner–Mindlin plate theory are determined using only three normal components of the corresponding tensors associated with three independent directions at the shell middle surface. The relations obtained for the invariants are employed to formulate a 15-dof curved triangular finite element for geometrically nonlinear analysis of thin and moderately thick elastic transversely isotropic shells undergoing arbitrarily large displacements and rotations. The question of improving nonlinear capabilities of the finite element without increasing the number of degrees of freedom is solved by assuming that the element sides are extensible planar nearly circular arcs. The shear locking is eliminated by approximating the curvature changes and transverse shear strains based on the solution of the Timoshenko beam equations. The performance of the finite element is studied using geometrically linear and nonlinear benchmark problems of plates and shells.     

Exact electroelastic analysis of functionally graded piezoelectric shells

A paper focuses on implementation of the sampling surfaces (SaS) method for the three-dimensional (3D) exact solutions for functionally graded (FG) piezoelectric laminated shells. According to this method, we introduce inside the nth layer I_n not equally spaced SaS parallel to the middle surface of the shell and choose displacements and electric potentials of these surfaces as basic shell variables. Such choice of unknowns yields, first, a very compact form of governing equations of the FG piezoelectric shell formulation and, second, allows the use of strain–displacement equations, which exactly represent rigid-body motions of the shell in any convected curvilinear coordinate system. It is worth noting that the SaS are located inside each layer at Chebyshev polynomial nodes that leads to a uniform convergence of the SaS method. As a result, the SaS method can be applied efficiently to 3D exact solutions of electroelasticity for FG piezoelectric cross-ply and angle-ply shells with a specified accuracy by using a sufficient number of SaS.     

Forced axisymmetric vibrations and self-heating of thermoviscoelastic cylindrical shells with piezoelectric actuators

The coupled problem of the forced axisymmetric vibrations and self-heating of electrothermoviscoelastic cylindrical shells with piezoceramic actuators under monoharmonic electromechanical loading is solved. The temperature dependence of the complex characteristics of the passive and piezoactive materials is taken into account. The coupled nonlinear problem of electrothermoelasticity is solved by using a time-marching method with discrete orthogonalization at each time step (to integrate the equations of elasticity) and an explicit finite-difference method (to solve the heat-conduction equations). An analysis is made of the effect of the boundary conditions at the shell ends, the dimensions of the piezoactuator, and the self-heating temperature on the actuator voltage and the effectiveness of active damping of the forced vibrations of the shell under uniform transverse monoharmonic pressure     

A geometrically nonlinear analysis of rotational shells using B-spline function

In this paper, based on the nonlinear thin shell theory, a geometrically nonlinear formulation using the total Lagrangian approach for rotational shells, as well as rotational shells on the Winkler-type elastic foundation, is presented. The displacements of the middle surface are approached by a B-spline function. All nonlinear terms of membrane strains are reserved. Two cases in which the arc length as well as ordinate is used as the coordinate parameter along meridional direction are discussed at the same time.The project supported by National natural Science Foundation of China.     

A time integral formulation and algorithm for structural dynamics with nonlinear stiffness

A newly-developed numerical algorithm, which is called the new Generalized-α (G-α) method, is presented for solving structural dynamics problems with nonlinear stiffness. The traditional G-α method has undesired overshoot properties as for a class of α-method. In the present work, seven independent parameters are introduced into the single-step three-stage algorithmic formulations and the nonlinear internal force at every time interval is approximated by means of the generalized trapezoidal rule, and then the algorithm is implemented based on the finite difference theory. An analysis on the stability, accuracy, energy and overshoot properties of the proposed scheme is performed in the nonlinear regime. The values or the ranges of values of the seven independent parameters are determined in the analysis process. The computational results obtained by the new algorithm show that the displacement accuracy is of order two, and the acceleration can also be improved to a second order accuracy by a suitable choice of parameters. Obviously, the present algorithm is zero-stable, and the energy conservation or energy decay can be realized in the high-frequency range, which can be regarded as stable in an energy sense. The algorithmic overshoot can be completely avoided by using the new algorithm without any constraints with respect to the damping force and initial conditions.The English text was polished by Keren Wang.