Coupled finite element modeling of piezothermoelastic materials

Abstract

The governing equations of piezo-thermoelastic materials show full coupling between mechanical, electric, and temperature fields. It is often assumed in the literature that in high-frequency oscillations, the coupling between the temperature and mechanical displacement and electric field is small and, therefore, can be neglected. A solution for the temperature field is then determined from an uncoupled equation. A finite element (FE) model that accounts for full coupling between the mechanical, electric, and thermal fields, nonlinear constitutive behavior and heat generation resulting from dielectric losses under alternating driving fields is under development. This paper presents a linear fully coupled model as an early development of the fully coupled nonlinear FE model. In the linear model, a solution for all field variables is obtained simultaneously and compared with the uncoupled solution. The finite element model is based on the weighted-residual principle and uses 2-D four-node isoparametric finite elements with four degrees of freedom per node. A thin piezoelectric square disk is modeled to obtain some preliminary understanding of the coupled fields in a piezoelectric stack actuator.