An electro-mechanical shell model for predicting stochastic vibration behavior of smart piezoelectric structure utilizing the Spectral-Tchebyche method

Random vibration analysis is an important indicator for conducting fatigue analysis as well as reliability analysis of engineering structures. At present, the vibration analysis for plate and shell structures is mostly limited to simple plate and shell structures, while the analysis of random vibration of smart piezoelectric structures is really scarce. In this paper, an electro-mechanical coupling model is proposed to examine the stochastic vibration characteristics of smart piezoelectric structures based on the Spectral-Tchebychev method (S-T), whose type of random excitation is pseudo-excitation method (PEM). By comparing the FEM, the literature and experiments, it is observed that S-T electromechanical coupling model proposed in this paper consumes much less computational time in predicting the stochastic response than the existing methods. Secondly, we focus on the effect of the piezoelectric layer on the stochastic vibration characteristics of the host structure. Then, artificial spring technique is also adopted to simulate the general boundary of the coupled electromechanical model for the random vibration analysis. The research work on the random vibration of piezoelectric smart structures in this paper can provide practical engineering experience for the design and equipment of smart structures.