Large-scale computational simulation for optimal design of curved piezoelectric actuator using composite material

In this paper, the electromechanical displacements of curved piezoelectric actuators with laminated composite material are calculated using high performance computing technology, and the optimal configuration of composite curved actuator is proposed. To predict the pre-stress in the device due to the mismatch in coefficients of thermal expansion, carbon-epoxy and glass-epoxy as well as PZT ceramic are numerically modeled by using hexahedral solid elements. Because the modeling of these thin layers causes the numbers of degree of freedom to increase, large-scale structural analyses are performed through the PEGASUS supercomputer which is composed of 400 Intel Xeon CPUs. In the first stage, the curved shape of the actuator and the internal stress in each layer are obtained by the cured curvature analysis. Subsequently, the displacement due to the piezoelectric force by an applied voltage is also calculated and the performance of composite curved actuator is investigated by comparing the displacements according to the configuration of the actuator. To consider the finite deformation in the first stage and include the pre-stress in each layer in the second analysis stage, nonlinear finite element analyses will be carried out. The thickness and the elastic constants of laminated composite are chosen as design factors.