Swarnamani S., Ganesan N., Annigeri A.

Research on magneto-electro-elastic materials has gained considerable importance recently. These smart composite materials exhibit a desirable coupling effect between electric and magnetic fields, which are potentially useful in design of smart or intelligent structure applications. The smart materials seem to provide unique capabilities of sensing and reacting to external disturbances, thus satisfying performance, reliability and light weight requirements imposed in any modern structural applications Saravanos and Heyliger (1999) and , Wua and Jin (2000) have reported that magneto-electro-elastic materials are extensively used as magnetic field probes, electric packaging, acoustic, hydrophones, medical ultrasonic imaging, sensors, and actuators with the responsibility of magneto-electro-mechanical energy conversion. In literature, few studies have been reported on study of free vibration behavior of magneto-electro-elastic structures, but use of finite element approach for such structure is limited. From the literature survey it is found that no finite element approach is reported for study of free vibrations of multiphase magneto-electro-elastic plate. Hence in present study, free vibration analysis of multiphase magneto-electro-elastic plates has been carried out by using assumed shape function in conjunction with finite element approach for simply supported plate. BaTiO3-CoFe2O4 composite is used as magneto-electro-elastic material. The aim of the study is to bring out the effect of piezoelectric, piezomagnetic and magneto electric coupling effects on the frequency behavior of the plate for proposed five cases of free vibrations. The finite element model is derived based on three dimensional constitutive equation of magneto-electro-elastic material accounting for coupling between elasticity, electric and magnetic effect. This finite element is approach has mechanical displacement components, electric potential and magnetic potential as nodal degrees of freedom. The numerical results on different volume fractions of BaTiO3 in BaTiO3-CoFe2O3 obtained by the present model are in good agreement with available three-dimensional exact benchmark solutions available in literature.