Piezoelectric sensor

About: Piezoelectric sensor is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 7127 publications have been published within this topic receiving 115903 citations.

Vibrations of an elastic structure with shunted piezoelectric patches: efficient finite element formulation and electromechanical coupling coefficients

Abstract: This article is devoted to the numerical simulation of the vibrations of an elastic mechanical structure equipped with several piezoelectric patches, with applications for the control, sensing and reduction of vibrations. At first, a finite element formulation of the coupled electromechanical problem is introduced, whose originality is that provided a set of non-restrictive assumptions, the system's electrical state is fully described by very few global discrete unknowns: only a couple of variables per piezoelectric patches, namely (1) the electric charge contained in the electrodes and (2) the voltage between the electrodes. The main advantages are (1) since the electrical state is fully discretized at the weak formulation step, any standard (elastic only) finite element formulation can be easily modified to include the piezoelectric patches (2) realistic electrical boundary conditions such that equipotentiality on the electrodes and prescribed global charges naturally appear (3) the global charge/voltage variables are intrinsically adapted to include any external electrical circuit into the electromechanical problem and to simulate shunted piezoelectric patches. The second part of the article is devoted to the introduction of a reduced-order model (ROM) of the problem, by means of a modal expansion. This leads to show that the classical efficient electromechanical coupling factors (EEMCF) naturally appear as the main parameters that master the electromechanical coupling in the ROM. Finally, all the above results are applied in the case of a cantilever beam whose vibrations are reduced by means of a resonant shunt. A finite element formulation of this problem is described. It enables to compute the system EEMCF as well as its frequency response, which are compared with experimental results, showing an excellent agreement.

Instantaneous reference-free crack detection based on polarization characteristics of piezoelectric materials

Abstract: A new methodology of guided-wave-based nondestructive testing (NDT) is developed to detect crack damage in a thin metal structure without using prior baseline data or a predetermined decision boundary. In conventional guided-wave-based techniques, damage is often identified by comparing the 'current' data obtained from a potentially damaged condition of a structure with the 'past' baseline data collected at the pristine condition of the structure. However, it has been reported that this type of pattern comparison with the baseline data can lead to increased false alarms due to its susceptibility to varying operational and environmental conditions of the structure. To develop a more robust damage diagnosis technique, a new concept of NDT is conceived so that cracks can be detected even when the system being monitored is subjected to changing operational and environmental conditions. The proposed NDT technique utilizes the polarization characteristics of the piezoelectric wafers attached on both sides of the thin metal structure. Crack formation creates Lamb wave mode conversion due to a sudden change in the thickness of the structure. Then, the proposed technique instantly detects the appearance of the crack by extracting this mode conversion from the measured Lamb waves, and the threshold value from damage classification is also obtained only from the current dataset. Numerical and experimental results are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed technique to instantaneous crack detection.

Thermo-electro-mechanical characteristics of functionally graded piezoelectric actuators

Abstract: This paper investigates the static bending, free vibration, and dynamic response of monomorph, bimorph, and multimorph actuators made of functionally graded piezoelectric materials (FGPMs) under a combined thermal-electro-mechanical load by using the Timoshenko beam theory. It is assumed that all of the material properties of the actuator, except for Poisson's ratio, are position dependent due to a continuous variation in material composition through the thickness direction. Theoretical formulations are derived by employing Hamilton's principle and include the effect of transverse shear deformation and axial and rotary inertias. The governing differential equations are then solved using the differential quadrature method to determine the important performance indices, such as deflection, reaction force, natural frequencies, and dynamic response of various FGPM actuators. A comprehensive parametric study is conducted to show the influence of shear deformation, temperature rise, material composition, slenderness ratio, end support, and total number of layers on the thermo-electro-mechanical characteristics. It is found that FGPM monomorph actuators exhibit the so-called 'non-intermediate' behavior under an applied electric field.