Under combined electro-thermo-mechanical loadings, the nonlinear bending of piezoelectric cylindrical shell reinforced with boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) is investigated in this paper. By employing nonlinear strains based on Donnell shell theory and utilizing piezoelectric theory including thermal effects, the constitutive relations of the piezoelectric shell reinforced with BNNTs are established. Then the governing equations of the structure are derived through variational principle and resolved by applying the finite difference method. In numerical examples, the effects of geometric nonlinear, voltage, temperature, as well as volume fraction on the deflection and bending moment of axisymmetrical piezoelectric cylindrical shell reinforced with BNNTs are discussed in detail.
744properties [2] and high thermal conductivity [3]. With the development of science and technology, a new sort of smart nanocomposites, with piezoelectric material as matrix and BNNTs as the reinforcement, has attracted increasing interests in both research and engineering communities. It is noted that the investigations on this new smart nanocomposites are limited in number and most discuss the linear problem. Therefore, it is necessary to do more extensive researches on the nonlinear behavior for this structure.At present, most researches are limited to discussing the behavior of piezoelectric structure without reinforcement of BNNTs. Yao et al. [4] presented static behaviors of piezoelectric cantilever actuator under large electric field. Shen [5] studied the nonlinear bending for a simply supported, shear deformable cross-ply laminated plate with piezoelectric actuators subjected to a transverse uniform or sinusoidal load combined with electrical loads and in thermal environments. Shegokar et al. [6] deals with the stochastic nonlinear bending response of functionally graded materials beam with surface bonded piezoelectric layers subjected to thermo-electro-mechanical loadings. Narita et al. [7] illustrated an analytical and experimental study of nonlinear bending response and domain wall motion in piezoelectric laminated actuators under electric fields. Beldica et al. [8] analyzed the bending of nonlinear viscoelastic beams with small or large deformations. Yan et al. [9] investigated the timedependent behavior of a simply supported, angle-ply piezoelectric laminate in cylindrical bending with viscoelastic interfaces. Narita et al. [10] discussed the static electromechanical displacement and polarization switching properties of piezoelectric laminated actuators under three point bending. Using a variational formulation, Li et al. [11] developed a size-dependent functionally graded piezoelectric beam model. Based on the local Petrov-Galerkin approach, Sladek et al.[12] proposed a meshless method for plate bending analysis with functionally graded piezoelectric material properties. Employing Euler-Bernoulli beam theory and the physical neutral surface concept, Fu et al. [13] presented the thermo-piezoelectric buckling, nonlinear free...