Piezolaminated beams with large deformations

The objective of the present paper is to demonstrate the effect of large deformations on the piezoelectric materials and structures. An energy based electromechanical piezoelectric constitutive law derived by Tiersten is adopted. For large deformation analysis of beams a counterpart of Von Karman’s plate equation is considered. The displacement fields in finite element method are based on the first order shear deformation theory. To analyze the nonlinear equilibrium equations an incremental iterative technique based on the Newton–Raphson method is employed. In the present algorithm the equilibrium is examined considering the electromechanical coupling effects. Nonlinear effects due to transverse and axial loading on a cantilever and a pinned–pinned PVDF bimorph beam have been investigated