Evolutionary piezoelectric actuators design optimisation for static shape control of smart plates

This paper presents a new evolutionary algorithm to solve various structural shape control problems of smart composite plate structures with active piezoelectric actuators. The linear least square (LLS) method and the features of evolutionary strategies are employed to find the applied voltages and shapes for the active piezoelectric actuators, respectively, in order to achieve the desired structural shapes by gradually removing the active piezoelectric material part of the element based on the error function sensitivity number. In the finite element (FE) analysis, an error function sensitivity number, including electro-mechanical effect, is one derived to compute the change in error functions that are defined in terms of least square difference between calculated and desired structural shapes. The evolutionary piezoelectric actuator design optimisation (EPADO) is proposed here to optimise the active piezoelectric actuator shape at a given applied voltage. Finally, several numerical examples are presented to verify that the proposed algorithm improves structural shape control by reducing the error function.