Dr. Yu Pengpeng from the School of Marine Science and Engineering, and the Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Coastal Ocean Environment–Land Evolution and Ecological Construction, published a research paper titled “Electromechanical transfer equations for sandwich-type piezoelectric unit groups” in the International Journal of Mechanical Sciences (CAS Q1 TOP journal, IF: 9.4), an internationally leading journal in the field of mechanics. Piezoelectric transducers are core components of deep-sea piezoelectric actuators, and establishing their electromechanical coupling dynamic models is essential for design optimization. To address the limitations of existing transfer matrix methods, which ignore the polarization isolation bands and electrode layers in piezoelectric ceramic sheets—leading to model distortion—and lack electromechanical transfer conditions, resulting in large matrix dimensions, this study establishes electromechanical coupling transfer equations for bending vibration piezoelectric excitation unit groups. This achieves the goals of incorporating modeling elements, improving prediction accuracy, and reducing matrix size.
The first author and corresponding author of this paper is Dr. Yu Pengpeng. Co-corresponding authors include Professor Wang Liang and Professor Jin Jiamei from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Piezoelectric transducers, which generate mechanical vibrations using the inverse piezoelectric effect of piezoelectric materials, are widely used in piezoelectric actuation, robotics, and ultrasonic-assisted machining. Constructing mechanical models is fundamental to the design and optimization of piezoelectric transducers. However, existing transfer matrix methods for the dynamic modeling of bending vibration piezoelectric excitation unit groups face the following challenges: (1) they cannot capture the effect of polarization isolation bands on bending vibration; (2) they neglect the numerous electrode layers, leading to overestimated calculated frequencies; and (3) the lack of electromechanical transfer conditions results in excessively large model matrix dimensions.
The main contributions of this study include: (1) A transfer matrix model for bending vibration piezoelectric ceramic sheets was developed, taking into account the dielectric and non-polarized properties of the polarization isolation bands. (2) Electromechanical transfer conditions for the piezoelectric-layer–electrode–piezoelectric-layer configuration were established based on structural continuity and electrical parallelism. (3) Ternary matrix combination operations were defined, and bending vibration transfer equations for piezoelectric excitation unit groups and chain-type piezoelectric transducers were derived, with the transfer matrix size consistently maintained at 5×5. (4) Simulation results indicate that a narrower polarization isolation band enhances bending vibration excitation.
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 52175015, 52275022), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant Nos. BK20222011, BK20230093), and the Research Startup Fund of Nanjing Normal University (Project No. 184080H201B132).