Copyright © 2012 Y. Y. Lee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An analytical quadrilateral p element is developed for solving the free vibrations of piezoelectric-laminated plates. The formulations of the displacement and strain fields are based on first-order shear deformation plate theory. The coupling effect between the electrical and stress fields is also considered. The Legendre orthogonal polynomials are used as the element interpolation functions, and the analytical integration technique is adopted. It is found that the present p element method gives high numerical precision results, fast and monotonic convergence rate. In the numerical cases, the effects of the number of hierarchical terms and mesh size on the convergence rate are investigated. Examples of square plates with different displacement and potential boundary conditions are studied. In the comparisons, the solutions of the present element are in good agreement with those obtained from other classical and finite element methods.