Micromechanical analysis of constitutive properties of active piezoelectric structural fiber (PSF) composites

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

6-6-2011

Abstract

Recent studies showed that the active piezoelectric structural fiber (PSF) composites may achieve significant and simultaneous improvements in sensing/actuating, stiffness, fracture toughness and vibration damping. These characteristics can be very important in the application of civil, mechanical and aerospace structures. The PSF is fabricated by coating the piezoceramic onto the silicon carbide core fiber with electrophoretic deposition (EPD) process to overcome the fragile nature of the monolithic piezoelectric materials. The PSF composite laminates are made of longitudinally poled PSFs that are unidirectionally deployed in the polymer binding matrix. The PSF laminate transducer has electrical inputs/outputs that are delivered through a separate etched interdigital electrode layer. This study analyzed the electromechanical properties with the generalized dilute scheme for active PSF composite laminate by considering multi-inclusions. The well-known Mori-Tanaka approach was used to evaluate the concentration tensor in the multi-inclusion micromechanics model. To accurately predict the transverse properties, the extended role of mixtures were applied by considering the inclusions' geometry and shape. The micromechanical finite element modeling was also conducted with representative volume element (RVE) to compare with the micromechanics analysis on the electromechanical properties. The micromechanics analysis and finite element micromechanical modeling were conducted with varied fiber geometry dimensions and volume fractions. These comparison studies indicate the combined micromechanics models with the generalized dilute scheme can effectively predict the electro-elastic properties of multi-inclusion PSF composites. © 2011 SPIE.

Publication Title

Proceedings of SPIE - The International Society for Optical Engineering

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS