Vibration and flutter analysis of damaged composite plates under thermal environment and its passive control using piezoelectric patches

Abstract

The internal flaws will largely affect the structural and aeroelastic characteristics of composite structures, especially at high thermal environments. The influence of thermal conditions on the passive control of vibration and flutter characteristics of damaged composite plates with piezoelectric patches is investigated in this work. The mathematical model is developed for the damaged composite plates with piezoelectric patches under thermal conditions by the finite element method. Internal flaws are incorporated in the composite plates based on the anisotropic damage modeling concept. Present finite element formulation is coded in the Matlab environment. The natural frequency, flutter velocity and flutter frequency values for damaged composite plates are obtained at different thermal conditions. Deterioration in the vibration and flutter characteristics are observed due to the presence of internal flaw in composite plates in the different thermal environments. PZT patches are bonded on the surface of the damaged composite plates subjected to the thermal environment and studies are carried out with different input voltages. Thus the improvement in the vibration and flutter characteristics of a damaged composite plate by employing PZT patches is presented for varying thermal conditions.

Keywords

• Thermal environment
• Vibration
• Flutter characteristics
• Anisotropic damage
• Piezoelectric material
• Finite element analysis