Exact electroelastic analysis of functionally graded piezoelectric shells

A paper focuses on implementation of the sampling surfaces (SaS) method for the three-dimensional (3D) exact solutions for functionally graded (FG) piezoelectric laminated shells. According to this method, we introduce inside the nth layer I-n not equally spaced SaS parallel to the middle surface of the shell and choose displacements and electric potentials of these surfaces as basic shell variables. Such choice of unknowns yields, first, a very compact form of governing equations of the FG piezoelectric shell formulation and, second, allows the use of strain-displacement equations, which exactly represent rigid-body motions of the shell in any convected curvilinear coordinate system. It is worth noting that the SaS are located inside each layer at Chebyshev polynomial nodes that leads to a uniform convergence of the SaS method. As a result, the SaS method can be applied efficiently to 3D exact solutions of electroelasticity for FG piezoelectric cross-ply and angle-ply shells with a specified accuracy by using a sufficient number of SaS. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.