SDT-piezo         Contents     Functions              PDF Index

5. Methods for meshing plates with piezoelectric patches

This section explains how to mesh plates with piezoelectric patches of different shapes. In all cases, multi-layer plate elements are used to represent the host plate and the additional piezoelectric layers. The first (basic) strategy consists in assigning additional layers with given piezoelectric properties to regions of the mesh. The second approach uses a script to remesh locally the plate and add piezoelectric layers according to a predefined set of patch shapes and piezoelectric properties.