Application of piezoelectric composite materials to sensors design

The purpose of this paper is to present analytical expressions of the effective constants of reinforced piezoelectric composite materials with periodical distributed unidirectional cylindrical fibers for transducer applications. Each periodic cell of the medium is a binary piezoelectric composite wherein both constituents are homogeneous piezoelectric materials with hexagonal symmetry. The general formulae obtained allow the prediction of global properties of an important class of piezocomposites. Numerical calculations show an adequate concordance with other theoretical models. Finally, we apply these results to a piezocomposite material and obtain new piezoelectrics with better global properties for biomedical imaging applications.