Vibration Excitation and Suppression of a Composite Laminate Plate Using Piezoelectric Actuators

Piezoelectric (PZT) actuators bonded on a structure can be used to generate deformation and excite vibration for the shape control and vibration suppression, respectively. This article proposes a theoretical model for predicting vibrational response of a composite laminate plate with PZT actuators. The bending moment induced by the PZT actuator was obtained and applied on the composite laminate plate. Utilizing composite mechanics and plate theory, an analytical solution of the vibrational response of a composite laminate plate excited by the PZT actuator with oscillating voltage was derived. Furthermore, the finite element analysis using ANSYS software (2019 version) was carried out to compare with the proposed model with a good agreement. A parametric study was performed to investigate the influences of PZT location and frequency on the vibration. Numerical results illustrate that mode can be selectively excited provided the PZT actuator is placed in an appropriate location. Moreover, the proposed model was employed to predict the effectiveness of vibration suppression by distributed PZT actuators. The novelty of this work is that a complicated coupling problem between the composite plate and bonded PZT actuator is resolved into two simple problems, leading to a simple analytical solution for the vibrational response of a composite plate induced by PZT actuators. The proposed model has been successfully demonstrated its applications on the vibration excitation and suppression of a composite laminate plate.