Author : Waleed Al-Ashtari and Abdal-Rasool Kareem

Static loads exposing to mechanical components can cause cracks, which are lead to form stress concentration regions causing the failure of structure. Generally, from 80% to 90% of structure failure is due to initiation of the cracks. Therefore, it is necessary to repair the crack and reduce its effect on the structure where the effect of the crack is modelled as an additional flexibility to the structure. In the last few years, piezoelectric materials have been considered as one of the most favourable repairing techniques. The piezoelectric material converts the applied voltage on it to a bending moment to counter the bending moment caused by the external load on the beam at the crack location. In this study, the design of the piezoelectric materials used to repair effect of crack on the mechanical behaviour of beam subjected to static loads is analytically achieved. This design includes calculating of desired dimensions of the material with the required voltage applied on it. The additional flexibility is expressed in term of a proposed unitless factor which can be calculated depend on experimental work. The results show that increasing the patch thickness increases the beam resistance to crack and load effects, while increasing the length of the piezoelectric material reduces the magnitude of the voltage required to repair the cracked beam.

Keywords: Piezoelectric materials, simply supported beam, additional flexibility

Article published in International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology, Vol.8, No.1 (Jan/Feb 2018)