Conception of Piezoelectric Composites

To enable actuation and sensing of structures with laminar elements like plates and shells, the application of piezoelectric materials is well established. In the 

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Piezoelectric Composite Sensors. The concept of piezoelectric composites comes from the idea to connect an active piezoelectric phase with a passive matrix phase in a way that the best features from both components can be enhanced and the shortcomings can be minimized correspondingly. Common examples are composites from a stiff ceramic with a soft polymer. 

The integration of piezoelectric materials into composites allows for the improvement of constitutive properties as well as of failure behavior and consequently for an extension of the application spectrum. So this chapter is concerned with the conception and modeling of such piezoelectric composites for structural apphcations. For the prediction of the effective composite properties, different methodologies of micro-electromechanics are investigated and vahdated through experiments and finite element analyses. 

The calculation procedure is based on the effective field method (EFM), i.e., the Mori -Tanaka method [26] generalized for heterogeneous piezoelectric media [16, 23], The EFM based on Eshelby s concept of spheroidal inclusions [27, 28] is a variant of the self-consistent scheme for the calculation of effective constants of the piezoactive composites. Following the EFM, we take into account the electromechanical interaction between the piezo-active inclusions in the matrix and related coupled effects. The effective electromechanical properties of the 0-3 composite are represented in the matrix form as... 

Most of the adhesively bonded pipe joints used in engineering, such as adhesively bonded socket joints, butt-weld and strap joints and heat activated coupling joints etc., can be basically regarded as two pieces of composite pipes joined by a connection coupler via the bonding adhesive, as shown in Figure 5. In order to reduce the stress concentration influence on the joint system, the smart beam-like joint concept was extended to develop a novel adhesively bonded smart composite pipe joint system by integrating the smart piezoelectric... 

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