Purpose
Safety improvement and cost reduction have a strong influence on the way to achieve maintenance operations of complex structures, in particular in air transportation, in civil engineering and others. In this case, piezoelectric ceramics such as sensors and actuators have been used. The advantages of piezoelectric materials include high achievable bandwidth, reliability, compactness, lightness and ease of implementation, thus making them well-suited to be used as actuators and sensors in the case of onboard structures. In this context, this study based around the examination of health and deformation of smart structures, taking into consideration the mechanical and piezoelectric behaviour of sensors and actuators, mechanical contact as well as the initial conditions and the imposed boundary conditions. This paper aims to present an approach for modeling of an intelligent structure by the finite element method. This structure is of aluminum type beam with elastic behaviur where piezoelectric rectangular pellets discreetly spread on the surface of the beam are instrumented. The numerical results were computed and compared to the experimental tests available in the literature and the results show the effectiveness of these piezoelectric (PZT) elements, depending on their positions, and to control the deformed structure, good agreement has been found between the experimental data and numerical predictions.
Design/methodology/approach
Numerical modeling by finite elements model for the measurement of the deformation and the change in shape of a clamped-free structure composed of both elastic and piezoelectric materials have been given by using the Ansys® software. The numerical results were valid by comparisons with analytical and experimental results find in the literature.
Findings
The numerical results showing a good correlation and agree very well. It was also concluded that the actuator and the sensor will be better placed at the housing because it is the position or the actuator that has the greatest impact and where the sensor gives the greatest signal. They are said to be co-located as glues one below the other on either side of the beam.
Originality/value
These materials have an inverse piezoelectric effect allowing them to control the form and present any noise or vibration at any time or position on the structure. The study presented in this paper targets the modeling of a PZT beam device for deform generation by transforming electrical energy into usable load. In this paper, a unimorph piezoelectric cantilever with traditional geometry is investigated for micromanipulation by using the software Ansys®.
