Analysis of thermo-electro-mechanical dynamic behavior of piezoelectric structures based on zonal Galerkin free element method

Abstract

Smart materials, whether natural or synthetic, often work in the thermo-electro-mechanical coupled field and are sensitive to stimulation from the external environment. This paper is aimed to simulate the static and transient thermo-electro-mechanical responses of the piezoelectric structures by the weak-form meshless method named thermal piezoelectric zonal Galerkin free element method (TP-ZGFREM). In this method, the computational domain is first divided into a group of zones and then each zone is discretized by nodes, which makes the method have a strong ability to complicated geometry. Then, the stability and accuracy of the results are ensured by using the Galerkin method in the process of establishing the equation for each node. Besides, the influence of temperature on the responses of piezoelectric structures is discussed in detail. The piezoelectric tuning fork with anisotropic material properties and the corrugated sandwich structure with piezoelectric bodies in practical engineering applications are given in the numerical examples, and the results that are a good approximation to the finite element method verify the maturity of the proposed method, which can provide a reference value for the practical design of smart structure subjected to thermal loads.