NURBS-based Isogeometric Finite Element Method for Analysis of Two-dimensional Piezoelectric Device

A novel numerical simulation method based on NURBS geometric description, first proposed by Hughes et al. is applied to analyze the two-dimensional piezoelectric structure. It was reported recently to have some remarkable advantages, such as the exact and unified geometry representation, high-order continuous elements and superior accuracy for per degree-of-freedom. Regrettably, the NURBS basis functions don't verify the Kronecker delta property at the control points, which would lead to an awkward implementation for imposing the essential boundary conditions. A variational form with the constraints was proposed in order to remedy this issue, and the essential boundary conditions are enforced by penalty methods. Two advantages can be observed for presented method: (i) symmetric and positive definite matrix; (ii) the dimension of the linear system is not increased. The numerical results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the present method. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [CEIS 2011]