A nine-node assumed strain shell element for analysis of a coupled electro-mechanical system

In the present paper, the formulation of a nine-node assumed strain shell element is modified and extended for use in analysis of actuator-embedded structures. The shell element can alleviate locking and has six degrees of freedom (DOFs) per node as a result of discarding the assumption of no thickness change. Mechanical–piezoelectric DOFs are coupled through the constitutive equation and the electric potential is assumed to be linear through the thickness of a piezoelectric layer. A finite-element program based on the formulation is generated and the code is validated though solving typical numerical examples. The results from the present work agree well with those from other references.