The use of piezoelectric stress stiffening to enhance buckling of laminated plates

Abstract

A technique for enhancement of buckling loads of composite plates is proposed. The technique relies on using stress stiffening to create a non-zero tensile force acting along the plate plane which ultimately permits the application of higher external compressive forces that lead to traditional buckling instabilities. The idea is to completely restrain the plate movements in its plane direction, at all edges, and to apply voltages to pairs of symmetrically bonded piezoelectric patches. This voltage is applied such that the piezoelectric patches contract resulting in a uniform tensile force over the plate plane.

Buckling and post-buckling analysis of delaminated piezo-composite material under electro-mechanical loading

“…where W p and L refer to the width and the length of laminate, respectively. Noteworthy, the polarization is in the thickness direction ( z direction) in the piezo-layers and are in accordance with studies available in the literature (De Faria and Donadon, 2010; Oh et al, 2000). Thus, the electrical field vector is expressed as…”

“…However, no post-buckling analysis was investigated in that study. While some studies have investigated the buckling analysis of piezo-composite material (Datchanamourtya and Blandford, 2008; De Faria and Donadon, 2010; Kapuria and Achary, 2006), the post-buckling analysis of a piezo-composite material has not been thoroughly studied. Shen (2002) developed a method based on classical laminated plate theory (CLPT) for post-buckling analysis of a cylindrical shell subjected to electro-thermo-mechanical loading.…”