An adaptive enhancement of dynamic buckling of a laminated composite beam under axial impact by surface bonded piezoelectric patches

A smart enhancement of dynamic buckling capacity of a laminated composite beam under an axial impact was achieved through surface bonded piezoelectric patches. It was demonstrated that applying the adaptive control of the electric field to the surface bonded piezoelectric patch could significantly decrease the lateral deflection of laminated composite beam, and, in turn, increase its dynamic buckling capacity. In the present study, the first-order shear deformation theory, with consideration of the large-amplitude deflection, was employed to derive the nonlinear dynamic governing equations of the laminated beam with surface bonded piezoelectric patch under an axial impact. Further, an improved differential quadrature (DQ) method, which could directly and simultaneously construct the interpolation functions in both the time and spatial dimensions, was developed to descretize and solve the nonlinear governing equations in both time and spatial dimensions. Several case studies were considered to investigate the efficiency and accuracy of the developed DQ method. The results were compared with those obtained from finite element method (FEM). It was observed that the application of the externally applied electric field to the surface bonded piezoelectric patch could effectively enhance the dynamic buckling capacity of the laminated beams.