A sampling surfaces method and its application to three-dimensional exact solutions for piezoelectric laminated shells

The application of the sampling surfaces (SaS) method to piezoelectric laminated composite plates is presented in a companion paper (Kulikov, G.M., Plotnikova, S.V., Three-dimensional exact analysis of piezoelectric laminated plates via sampling surfaces method. International Journal of Solids and Structures 50, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2013.02.015). In this paper, we extend the SaS method to shells to solve the static problems of three-dimensional (3D) electroelasticity for cylindrical and spherical piezoelectric laminated shells. For this purpose, we introduce inside the nth layer I_n not equally spaced SaS parallel to the middle surface of the shell and choose displacements of these surfaces as basic kinematic variables. Such choice of displacements permits, first, the presentation of governing equations of the proposed piezoelectric shell formulation in a very compact form and, second, gives an opportunity to utilize the strain–displacement equations, which precisely represent all rigid-body shell motions in any convected curvilinear coordinate system. It is shown that the developed piezoelectric shell formulation can be applied efficiently to finding of 3D exact solutions for piezoelectric cross-ply and angle-ply shells with a specified accuracy using a sufficient number of SaS, which are located at Chebyshev polynomial nodes and layer interfaces as well.