Shape and Failure Control of Composite Laminates Using Piezoelectric Actuators

Z. Hasan
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Published in 2010

The present work focuses on the use of piezoelectric materials as actuators for shape control of composite laminates such as Lead Zircronate Titanate (PZT), and other piezoelectric fiber composites such as Active fiber composites (AFCs), Microfiber Composites (MFCs) which allow for improvement of their constitutive properties. By using embedded actuators, such that, the active part is incorporated into one of the layers of the composite beam during the manufacturing process, in this case the stress concentration will vanish while obtaining similar actuation values, Moreover, a control algorithm is proposed based on the classical lamination theory (CLT) for predicting the failure load and mode of a composite laminate under uniaxial/biaxial load. By incorporating the first ply and the ultimate laminate failure criteria’s and using such active materials, a counter voltage value could be applied to prevent failure from occurring where the finite element software COMSOL Multiphysics was used to verify the present approach.

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