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In this study, the coupled solid piezoelectric and shell inverse-piezoelectric analysis method for a thin piezoelectric bimorph with metal layers is proposed. The piezoelectric bimorph is usually thin and includes the metal layers such as the electrode and the shim plate. In the proposed method, the solid and shell elements are used for the piezoelectric and inverse-piezoelectric analyses, respectively, since the solid elements can describe the various types of the distributions of the electric potential along the thickness, and the shell elements are suitable for analyzing the thin structure. The block Gauss-Seidel method is used to couple the solid piezoelectric and shell inverse-piezoelectric analyses. In the iterative passing of the solution variables, the transformation method is used between the solid and shell elements. The rules of mixture for the bending rigidity and the mass are used for modeling the single shell structure in the inverse-piezoelectric analysis. A pseudo-piezoelectric modeling for the conductor is proposed to consider the metal layers in the piezoelectric analysis. This modeling allows us to reuse existing programs of the piezoelectric analysis without any modification.

Piezoelectric–structure–fluidinteractionisacomplexmultiphysicscoupledphenomena appears wherein piezoelectric devices are in contact or surrounded by the fluid media. The piezoelectric energy harvesting using ocean waves, wind flow, and mechanical vibrations are some of the popular energy savaging methods wherein thin piezoelectric bimorphs surrounded by the fluid is used for power harvesting. With recent advances on micro air vehicles actuated by piezoelectric bimorph actuators in the fluid (surrounding media) as attracted the of piezoelectric–structure–fluid interaction. Generally, in these applications, the piezoelectric bimorph is thin, flexible, and surrounded by the fluid. The large deformation of the thin flexible piezoelectric bimorph causes strong interaction with the electric field (piezoelectric effect) and the surrounding fluid, and inversely, these two fields significantly affect the structure. The piezoelectric field–structure–fluid interaction analysis is very significant. In this work, we propose a hierarchal decomposition method to solve piezoelectric–structure–fluid interaction of a piezoelectric bimorph in the fluid. The proposed method is applied to a flexible restrictor flap in converging channel, where the rubber flap is replaced by the piezoelectric bimorphs made of PVDF or PZT–5H. The resonance frequency of the piezoelectric bimorph in the fluid agrees well with the theoretical and numerical pure FSI cases. These results show a good agreement with the previous studies.