Sensor and Actuator Capabilities of a Laminated Piezoelectric Plate Model

In a recent paper (cf. [

1

]) a new nonhomogeneous anisotropic piezoelectric plate model was derived, using the asymptotic analysis method, and for a plate with nonconstant piezoelectric and dielectric coefficients.

In the present paper we adopt this new plate model to analyze the sensor and actuator effects (cf. [

2

]) of a thin laminated plate formed by stacking two or more layers of different piezoelectric materials. Moreover, we also justify the expression of the electric potential of the laminated plate, as a quadratic polynomial of the plate’s thickness variable.

Several numerical results are reported. They illustrate the influence of the location of the applied electric potential and mechanical forces, and the effect of the boundary conditions, on the actuator and sensor capabilities of the thin laminated plate. The test problems are formulated as multi-objective optimization problems, which are solved through genetic algorithms (cf. [

3

]).