“…The resulting active-fiber composite (AFC) structure was first characterized by Bent et al (Bent, 1997;Bent et al, 1995), and its properties were further investigated by others (Belloli et al, 2007;Berger et al, 2005;Brei and Cannon, 2004;Sodano, 2008, 2009) numerically and experimentally in next-generation efforts. However, the AFC technology employed piezoelectric fibers with circular cross section that limited the interactions between fibers and electrodes, yielding low electromechanical coupling and high dielectric loss.…”