Large-scale Simulation for Optimal Design of Composite Curved Piezoelectric Actuator

복합재료 곡면형 자동기의 최적설계를 위한 대규모 수치해석 연구

In this paper, the electromechanical displacements of curved piezoelectric actuators composed of PZT ceramic and laminated composite materials are calculated based on high performance computing technology and the optimal configuration of composite curved actuator is examined. To accurately predict the local 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 increases the number of degrees of freedom, large-scale structural analyses are performed through the PEGASUS supercomputer, which is installed in our laboratory. 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 (which is resulted from applied voltage) is also calculated. The performance of composite curved actuator is investigated by comparing the displacements obtained by the variation of thickness and elastic modulus of laminated composite layers. In order to consider the finite deformation in the first analysis stage and include the pre-stress due to curing process in the second stage, nonlinear finite element analyses are carried out.