Effect of Thermal and Electric Coupling on the Multifield Response of Laminated Shell Structures Employing Higher-Order Theories

The paper introduces a refined formulation, based on higher-order theories, for the thermo-electro-elastic analysis of laminated shell structures made of smart materials. The formulation employs a generalized higher-order model to describe the configuration variables, following the Equivalent Single Layer and Equivalent-Layer-Wise approaches. After presenting an effective homogenization procedure for thermo-electro-elastic smart composites, the fundamental equations are derived in curvilinear principal coordinates, taking into account the coupling effects among mechanical elasticity, electricity, and heat conduction. A semi-analytical solution is then obtained using Navier’s method. Furthermore, the three-dimensional response of the panel is determined through a recovery procedure that applies the Generalized Differential Quadrature (GDQ) numerical method. Numerical examples are provided, where the formulation is applied to both straight and curved panels subjected to various surface actions. These examples point out the coupling effect between different physical phenomena on the multifield three-dimensional response. Furthermore, the numerical results based on the proposed formulation are verified to be consistent with predictions from finite-element-based models, despite the reduced computational cost. The manuscript enables in a simple way the study of physical couplings between different fields that are not considered in most commercial software. As a result, this formulation offers a valuable tool for designing doubly-curved laminated panels made of innovative smart materials for novel engineering applications.