A new piezoelectric shell element and its application in static shape control

In this paper, a new three-dimensional piezoelectric thin shell element containing anintegrated distributed piezoelectric sensor and actuator is proposed. The distributed piezoelectric sensorlayer monitors the structural shape deformation due to the direct effect and the distributed actuator layersuppresses the deflection via the converse piezoelectric effect. A finite element formulation is presentedfor static response of laminated shell with piezoelectric sensors/actuators. An eight-node and forty-DOFshell element is built. The performance of the shell elements is improved by reduced integrationtechnique. The static shape control of structure is derived. The shell element is verified by calculatingpiezoelectric polymeric PVDF bimorph beam. The results agreed with those obtained by theoreticalanalysis, Tzou and Tseng (1990) and Hwang and Park (1993) fairly well. At last, the static shape controlof a paraboloidal antenna is presented.