Based on the theory of piezoelasticity, the static performance of a piezoelectric bilayer cantilever fully covered with electrodes on the upper and lower surfaces is studied. Three models are considered, i.e., the sensor model, the driving displacement model and the blocking force model. By establishing suitable boundary conditions and proposing an appropriate Airy stress function, the exact solutions for piezoelectric bilayer cantilevers are obtained, and the effect of ambient thermal excitation is taken into account. Since the layer thicknesses and material parameters are distinguished in different layers, this paper gives unified solutions for composite piezoelectric bilayer cantilevers including piezoelectric bimorph and piezoelectric heterogeneous bimorph, etc. For some special cases, the simplifications of the present results are compared with other solutions given by other researches based on one-dimensional constitutive equations, and some amendments have been found. The present investigation shows: (1) for a PZT-4 piezoelectric bimorph, the amendments of tip deflections induced by an end shear force, an end moment or an external voltage are about 19.59%, 23.72% and 7.21%, respectively; (2) for a PZT-4-Al piezoelectric heterogeneous bimorph with constant layer thicknesses, the amendments of tip deflections induced by an end shear force, an end moment or an external voltage are 9.85%, 11.78% and 4.07%, respectively, and the amendments of the electrode charges induced by an end shear force or an end moment are both 1.04%; (3) for a PZT-4-Al piezoelectric heterogeneous bimorph with different layer thicknesses, the maximum amendment of tip deflection approaches 23.72%, and the maximum amendment of electrode charge approaches 31.09%. The present solutions can be used to optimize bilayer devices, and the Airy stress function can be used to study other piezoelectric cantilevers including multi-layered piezoelectric cantilevers under corresponding loads.

A unified formulation of finite layer methods (FLMs), based on the Reissner mixed variational theorem (RMVT), is developed for the three-dimensional (3D) coupled electro-elastic analysis of simply-supported, functionally graded piezoelectric material (FGPM) plates with open- and closed-circuit surface conditions and under electro-mechanical loads. In this formulation, the material properties of the plate are assumed to obey an exponent-law varying exponentially through the thickness coordinate, and the plate is divided into a number of finite rectangular layers, in which the trigonometric functions and Lagrange polynomials are used to interpolate the in- and out-of-plane variations of the primary field variables of each individual layer, respectively, such as the elastic displacement, transverse shear and normal stress, electric potential, and normal electric displacement components. The relevant orders used for expanding these variables in the thickness coordinate can be freely chosen as the linear, quadratic and cubic orders. Four different mechanical/electrical loading conditions applied on the top and bottom surfaces of the plate are considered, and the corresponding coupled electro-elastic analysis of the loaded FGPM plates is undertaken. The accuracy and convergence rate of the RMVT-based FLMs are assessed by comparing their solutions with the exact 3D piezoelectricity ones available in the literature.

While tuned mass dampers are found to be effective in suppressing vibration in a tall building, integrating it with a semi-active control system enables it to perform more efficiently. In this paper a forty-story tall steel-frame building designed according to the Canadian standard, has been studied with and without semi-active and passive tuned mass dampers. The building is assumed to be located in the Vancouver, Canada. A magneto-rheological fluid based semi-active tuned mass damper has been optimally designed to suppress the vibration of the structure against seismic excitation, and an appropriate control procedure has been implemented to optimize the building's semi-active tuned mass system to reduce the seismic response. Furthermore, the control system parameters have been adjusted to yield the maximum reduction in the structural displacements at different floor levels. The response of the structure has been studied with a variety of ground motions with low, medium and high frequency contents to investigate the performance of the semi-active tuned mass damper in comparison to that of a passive tuned mass damper. It has been shown that the semi-active control system modifies structural response more effectively than the classic passive tuned mass damper in both mitigation of maximum displacement and reduction of the settling time of the building.

This paper presents theoretical and experimental evaluation of the structural health monitoring (SHM) capability of piezoelectric wafer active sensors (PWAS) at elevated temperatures. This is important because the technologies for structural sensing and monitoring need to account for the thermal effect and compensate for it. Permanently installed PWAS transducers have been One of the extensively employed sensor technologies for in-situ continuous SHM. In this paper, the electro-mechanical impedance spectroscopy (EMIS) method has been utilized as a dynamic descriptor of PWAS behavior and as a high frequency standing wave local modal technique. Another SHM technology utilizes PWAS as far-field transient transducers to excite and detect guided waves propagating through the structure. This paper first presents how the EMIS method is used to qualify and quantify circular PWAS resonators in an increasing temperature environment up to 230 deg C. The piezoelectric material degradation with temperature was investigated and trends of variation with temperature were deduced from experimental measurements. These effects were introduced in a wave propagation simulation software called Wave Form Revealer (WFR). The thermal effects on the substrate material were also considered. Thus, the changes in the propagating guided wave signal at various temperatures could be simulated. The paper ends with summary and conclusions followed by suggestions for further work.

Numerical analysis of large amplitude free vibration behaviour of laminated composite spherical shell panel embedded with the piezoelectric layer is presented in this article. For the investigation purpose, a general nonlinear mathematical model has been developed using higher order shear deformation mid-plane kinematics and Green-Lagrange nonlinearity. In addition, all the nonlinear higher order terms are included in the present mathematical model to achieve any general case. The nonlinear governing equation of freely vibrated shell panel is obtained using Hamilton's principle and discretised using isoparametric finite element steps. The desired nonlinear solutions are computed numerically through a direct iterative method. The validity of present nonlinear model has been checked by comparing the responses to those available published literature. In order to examine the efficacy and applicability of the present developed model, few numerical examples are solved for different geometrical parameters (fibre orientation, thickness ratio, aspect ratio, curvature ratio, support conditions and amplitude ratio) with and/or without piezo embedded layers and discussed in details.

In civil engineering, probabilistic seismic risk assessment is used to predict the economic damage to a lifeline system of possible future earthquakes. The results are used to plan mitigation measures and to strengthen the structures where necessary. Instead, after an earthquake public authorities need mathematical models that compute: the damage caused by the earthquake to the individual vulnerable components and links, and the global behavior of the lifeline system. In this study, a framework that was developed and used for prediction purpose is modified to assess the consequences of an earthquake in quasi real-time after such earthquake happened. This is possible because nowadays entire seismic regions are instrumented with tight networks of strong motion stations, which provide and broadcast accurate intensity measure maps of the event to the public within minutes. The framework uses the broadcasted map and calculates the damage to the lifeline system and its component in quasi real-time. The results give the authorities the most likely status of the system. This helps emergency personnel to deal with the damage and to prioritize visual inspections and repairs. A highway transportation network is used as a test bed but any lifeline system can be analyzed.

In many of microdevices a part of a microbeam is covered by a piezoelectric layer. Depend on the application a DC or AC voltage is applied between upper and lower side of the piezoelectric layer. A common method in many of previous works for evaluating the response of these structures is discretizing by Galerkin method. In these works often single mode shape of a uniform microbeam i.e. the microbeam without piezoelectric layer has been used as comparison function, and so the convergence of the solution has not been verified. In this paper the Galerkin method is used for discretization, and a comprehensive analysis on the convergence of solution of equation that is discretized using this comparison function is studied for both clamped-clamped and clamped-free microbeams. The static and dynamic solution resulted from Galerkin method is compared to the modal expansion solution. In addition the static solution is compared to an exact solution. It is denoted that the required numbers of uniform microbeam mode shapes for convergence of static solution due to DC voltage depends on the position and thickness of deposited piezoelectric layer. It is shown that when the clamped-clamped microbeam is coated symmetrically by piezoelectric layer, then the convergence for static solution may be obtained using only first mode. This result is valid for clamped-free case when it is covered by piezoelectric layer from left clamped side to the right. It is shown that when voltage is AC then the number of required uniform microbeam shape mode for convergence is much more than the number of required mode in modal expansion due to the dynamic effect of piezoelectric layer. This difference increases by increasing the piezoelectric thickness, the closeness of the excitation frequency to natural frequency and decreasing the damping coefficient. This condition is often indefeasible in microresonator system. It is concluded that discreitizing the equation of motion using one mode shape of uniform microbeam as comparison function in many of previous works causes considerable errors.

The Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) consists of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and Hilbert spectral analysis. EMD has been successfully applied for identification of mode shapes of structures based on input-output approaches. This paper aims to extend application of EMD for output-only identification of mode shapes of linear structures. In this regard, a new simple and efficient method based on band-pass filtering and EMD is proposed. Having rather accurate estimates of modal frequencies from measured responses, the proposed method is capable to extract the corresponding mode shapes. In order to evaluate the accuracy and performance of the proposed identification method, two case studies are considered. In the first case, the performance of the method is validated through the analysis of simulated responses obtained from an analytical structural model with known dynamical properties. The low-amplitude responses recorded from the UCLA Factor Building during the 2004 Parkfield earthquake are used in the second case to identify the first three mode shapes of the building in three different directions. The results demonstrate the remarkable ability of the proposed method in correct estimation of mode shapes of the linear structures based on rather accurate modal frequencies.

Tuned mass dampers (TMDs) have been a prevalent vibration control device for suppressing excessive vibration because of environmental loadings in contemporary tall buildings since the mid-1970s. A TMD must be tuned to the natural frequency of the primary structure to be effective. In practice, a TMD may be assembled in situ, simultaneously with the building construction. In such a situation, the respective dynamic properties of the TMD device and building cannot be identified to determine the tuning status of the TMD. For this purpose, a methodology was developed to obtain the parameters of the TMD and primary building on the basis of the eigenparameters of any two complex modes of the combined building-TMD system. The theory was derived in state-space to characterize the nonclassical damping feature of the system, and combined with a system identification technique to obtain the system eigenparameters using the acceleration measurements. The proposed procedure was first demonstrated using a numerical verification and then applied to real, experimental data of a large-scale building-TMD system. The results showed that the procedure is capable of identifying the respective parameters of the TMD and primary structure and is applicable in real implementations by using only the acceleration response measurements of the TMD and its located floor.

Magnetorheological (MR) fluids are capable of changing their rheological properties under the application of external fields. When MR fluids operate in the so-called squeeze mode, in which displacement levels are limited to a few millimetres but there are large forces, they have many potential applications in vibration isolation. This paper presents an experimental and a numerical investigation of the performance of an MR fluid under tensile and compressive loads and oscillatory squeeze-flow. The performance of the fluid was found to depend dramatically on the strain direction. The shape of the stress-strain hysteresis loops was affected by the strength of the applied field, particularly when the fluid was under tensile loading. In addition, the yield force of the fluid under the oscillatory squeeze-flow mode changed almost linearly with the applied electric or magnetic field. Finally, in order to shed further light on the mechanism of the MR fluid under squeeze operation, computational fluid dynamics analyses of non-Newtonian fluid behaviour using the Bingham-plastic model were carried out. The results confirmed superior fluid performance under compressive inputs.