Buckling of piezoelectric functionally graded plate subjected to electro-mechanical loading

This paper investigates the stability analysis of a functionally graded (FG) plate integrated with a piezoelectric sensor and actuator at the top and bottom faces, subjected to electrical and mechanical loading. The material properties of the FG plates are assumed to be graded along the thickness direction according to simple power law distribution in terms of the volume fraction of the constituents, while the Poisson's ratio is assumed to be constant. The analysis is carried out on plates with different boundary conditions: for example, the plate is simply supported at all edges (SSSS) or the plate is simply supported along two opposite sides perpendicular to the direction of compression and clamped along the other two sides (CSCS). The finite element model is derived with the von Karman hypothesis and as a degenerate shell element using the FSDT. The displacement component of the present model is expanded in Taylor's series in terms of the thickness co-ordinate. The governing equilibrium equation is obtained using the minimum energy principle and the solution for critical buckling load is obtained by solving the eigenvalue problem. The stability analysis of the piezoelectric FG plate is carried out to present the effect of power law index, applied mechanical pressure and different boundary conditions.