New piezoelectric thin-shell vibration theory

Abstract

In recent years, the strong demand on high-performance structures has driven the development of "smart" materials and stractures. Piezoelectric smart stri.ictures composed of passive elastic materials and active piezoelectric materials are developed recently and they seem to be very promising in a variety of engineering applications. In this paper, a new piezoelectric thin-shell vibration theory is proposed and the system electrodynamic eqtations of piezoelectric shells are formulated vising Hamilton 's principle and piezoelectricity theory. General electric and mechanical boundary conditions are also derived. The proposed piezoelectric shell theory is very generic, which can be simplified to account for many other commonly occurred geometries, such as spheres, cylinders, plates, cones, etc. Simplification of the generic theory to two plate cases (thin and thick) is demonstrated in a case study.