Abstract: Piezoelectric bender elements are widely used as electromechanical sensors and actuators. An analytical sandwich beam model for piezoelectric bender elements was developed based on the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT), which assumes a single rotation angle for the whole cross-section and a quadratic distribution function for coupled electric potential in piezoelectric layers, and corrects the effect of transverse shear strain on the electric displacement integration. Free vibration analysis of simply-supported bender elements was carried out and the numerical results showed that, solutions of the present model for various thickness-to-length ratios are compared well with the exact two-dimensional solutions, which presents an efficient and accurate model for analyzing dynamic electromechanical responses of bender elements.

Key words: bender elements, piezoelectric, sandwich beam, shear correction factor, analytical model