Investigating the thermal environment effects on geometrically nonlinear vibration of smart functionally graded plates

An analytical solution for a sandwich circular FGM plate coupled with piezoelectric layers under one-dimensional heat conduction is presented. All materials of the device may be of any functional gradients in the direction of thickness. The solution exactly satisfies all the equilibrium conditions and continuity conditions for the stress, displacement and electric displacement as well as electric potential on the interfaces between adjacency layers. A nonlinear static problem is solved first to determine the initial stress state and pre-vibration deformations of the FG plate that is subjected to in-plane forces and applied actuator voltage in thermal environment in the case of simply supported boundary conditions. By adding an incremental dynamic state to the pre-vibration state, the differential equations that govern the nonlinear vibration behavior of pre-stressed piezoelectric coupled FGM plates are derived. The role of thermal environment as well as control effects on nonlinear static deflections and natural frequencies imposed by the piezoelectric actuators using high input voltages are investigated. Numerical examples are provided and simulation results are discussed. Numerical results for FGM plates with a mixture of metal and ceramic are presented in dimensionless forms. The good agreement between the results of this paper and those of the finite element (FE) analyses validated the presented approach. In a parametric study the emphasis is placed on investigating the effect of varying the applied actuator voltage and thermal environment as well as gradient index of FG plate on the dynamics and control characteristics of the structure.