2019 Volume 2019 Pages 20190011
Piezoelectric bimorph for actuators and sensors is usually thin and includes conductor layers such as the electrode and the shim plate. Therefore, this study deals with the coupled piezoelectric and inverse-piezoelectric analysis of thin piezoelectric bimorph with the conductor layers. Solid elements can describe the various types of distributions of electric potential along the thickness, while shell elements are more appropriate to analyze the thin structures. Therefore, instead of using piezoelectric solid elements or piezoelectric shell elements for both the piezoelectric and inverse-piezoelectric analyses, the solid and shell elements are used to simulate the electrical and structural fields, respectively. The coupled algorithm is based on the block Gauss-Seidel method and the transformation method between the solid and shell variables. In the structural analysis, the rule of mixtures for the bending rigidity and the mass is used. A pseudo-piezoelectric evaluation method for the conductor is proposed in order to use the existing programs for the piezoelectric and inverse-piezoelectric analyses without any modification. Finally, it is demonstrated that the proposed method shows very accurate potential distributions in the actuator and sensor modes of the thin piezoelectric bimorph with the conductor layers.
