Study of induced strain transfer in piezoceramic smart material systems

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Abstract
Smart materials such as piezoceramics are being used as actuators and sensors to achieve active control of elastic deformations of structures. Intelligent structures, with highly distributed actuators and sensors, can be designed with intrinsic vibration and shape control capabilities. Piezoceramics can be integrated with a structure either by being embedded within or bonded onto the structure. Particularly for the case of surface bonding, it is important to have an effective strain transfer from the smart material to the metallic substrate through the adhesive layer. In this paper, study of the strain transfer of piezoceramic actuators bonded to the surface of a structure with a finite-thickness adhesive bond is presented. A structure with actuators bonded to the top and bottom surfaces of a cantilever beam, which can deform in either bending or extension, is analysed. A detailed two-dimensional model of the structure is developed to study this strain transfer through an adhesive layer using the finite-difference method to solve the equations of elasticity, with appropriate boundary conditions. The resulting strains in the actuator and those induced in the substructure are compared with a finite-element model and two existing one-dimensional analytical models. The limitations of the simplified analytical models are brought out. The uniform-strain analytical model was found to be in agreement with the numerical models only for the case of extension actuation. The Bernoulli-Euler analytical bending model agreed with the numerical models only at points near the center of the structure. The finite-difference and finite-element models were in agreement in almost all cases. For the case of bending actuation, the finite-difference and finite-element methods differed in their predictions of induced strains.

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