Nonlinear behaviour of piezoceramics under weak electric fields. Part II: Numerical results and validation with experiments

When excited near resonance in the presence of weak electric fields, piezoceramic materials exhibit typical nonlinearities similar to a Duffing oscillator such as jump phenomena and presence of superharmonics in the response spectra. In an accompanying paper, a generalized nonlinear 3D finite element formulation has been developed incorporating quadratic and cubic terms in the electric enthalpy density function and the virtual work done by damping forces. In this paper, the formulation has been validated by conducting experiments on test pieces of various geometries and of three different materials (in all, four case studies). Both proportional damping and nonlinear damping formulations have been used to predict the frequency response of these systems. Newmark-β method has been used to obtain the dynamic response of the systems using FE analysis. It is demonstrated that the nonlinear finite element model is able to predict the responses of the various test cases studied and the results match very well with those of experimental observations.