A microstructure-dependent anisotropic magneto-electro-elastic Mindlin plate model based on an extended modified couple stress theory

A new model for anisotropic magneto-electro-elastic Mindlin plates is developed by using an extended modified couple stress theory. The equations of motion and complete boundary conditions are simultaneously obtained by a variational formulation based on Hamilton’s principle. The new anisotropic magneto-electro-elastic plate model includes the models for orthotropic and transversely isotropic magneto-electro-elastic Mindlin plates and the model for isotropic Mindlin plates, all incorporating the microstructure effect, as special cases. To illustrate the new model, the static bending and free vibration problems of a simply supported transversely isotropic magneto-electro-elastic plate are analytically solved by directly applying the general formulas derived. For the static bending problem, the numerical results reveal that the deflection, rotation, electric potential, and magnetic potential of the simply supported plate predicted by the current non-classical model are always smaller than those predicted by the classical elasticity-based model, and the differences are significant when the plate thickness is very small but is diminishing as the thickness increases. For the free vibration problem, it is found that the natural frequency predicted by the new plate model is higher than that predicted by the classical model, and the difference is quite large for very thin plates.