FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS APPLIED TO EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVE MATERIAL COEFFICIENTS FOR PIEZOELECTRIC FIBER COMPOSITES

Abstract. Piezoelectric fiber composites have several potential applications in aerospace industry due the high level design requirements that can be provided for this kind of material in applications such as structure health monitoring, precision positioning and vibration control or suppression. Difficulties in fiber manufacturing techniques and behavior prediction are the main obstacles to the practical implementation of this technology. In this work one procedure for determining effective properties of one ply made of unidirectional fibers from individual properties of the constituent materials and composite characteristics is presented and discussed. The procedure is based in the modeling of a Representative Volume Element (RVE) or a unit cell by finite element method. The RVE is analyzed under several loading and boundary conditions in order to evaluate of the effective material coefficients (elastic, dielectric end piezoelectric). The results are discussed and compared with analytical and numerical results presented by other researchers