Nonlinear vibration and dynamic response of FGM plates with piezoelectric fiber reinforced composite actuators

This paper deals with the nonlinear vibration and dynamic response of a shear deformable functionally graded material (FGM) plate with surface-bonded piezoelectric fiber reinforced composite actuators (PFRC) in thermal environments. The temperature field considered is assumed to be distributed uniformly over the plate surface and varied in the thickness direction of the plate, and the electric field is assumed to be the transverse component EzEz only. Material properties of the substrate FGM layer are assumed to be graded in the thickness direction according to a simple power law distribution in terms of the volume fractions of the constituents, and the material properties of both FGM and PFRC layers are assumed to be temperature-dependent. The formulations are based on the higher order shear deformation plate theory and general von Kármán-type equation that includes thermo-piezoelectric effects. The numerical illustrations concern nonlinear vibration characteristics of (P/FGM/P) and (FGM/P) plates under different sets of thermal and electric loading conditions, from which results for monolithic piezoelectric actuators are obtained as comparators. The results reveal that the effect of control voltage on the natural frequency of an FGM plate with PFRC actuators is larger than that of the plate with monolithic piezoelectric actuators. They also show that the control voltage only has a small effect on the dynamic response of the (P/FGM/P) plate, but it has a significant effect on the dynamic response of the (FGM/P) plate.