Homogenization techniques and application to piezoelectric composite materials

Abstract

Investigating piezoelectric composites is a recent research domain. Direct measurements on piezoelectric composites are not always easy, making the use of homogenization to determine all its electroelastic characteristics of major interest. This work presents the homogenization for the periodic piezoelectric media by means of the finite element method. The particular details are given for generalized plane strain (GPS) case. As application of the proposed model, numerical developments were presented for three different piezoelectric media: unidirectional piezoelectric fiber composites, 1.3 piezoelectric transducer and muscle materials considered as “semi-piezoelectric” material. The predicted values are in good agreement with the other numerical results in literature and the available experimental data.