Geometric eccentricity effect on thickness-shear vibration of an elliptical flexoelectric crystal plate

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, a thickness-shear vibration model for a two-dimensional finite flexoelectric crystal plate with slowly varying thickness and elliptical cross section is presented. The influences of eccentricity and flexoelectricity on the fundamental frequencies of thickness-shear vibration and electric potential distributions under short circuit boundary condition are investigated. The proposed model uses the first order McLaughlin series to approximate the elliptical function and the first derivative of elliptical function is ignored since the plate thickness varies slowly. For the finite plate, the symmetric mode in length and antisymmetric mode in thickness are adopted for the displacement function. In addition, only the shear strain gradient through the thickness is used in the mathematical model for the thin and long flexoelectric crystal plate. By implementing the variational principle, the governing equations are obtained and further solved by the Galerkin method. The obtained frequencies of thickness-shear mode are expressed in terms of eccentricity and length-to-thickness ratio. The results show that the eccentricity has great influence on the nondimensional fundamental frequencies. A small reduction in eccentricity results in significant increment of the nondimensional frequency implying that it is possible to increase the fundamental frequency by changing the cross section of the elliptical flexoelectric plate. The flexoelectric effect is also found to affect the nondimensional frequency and electric potential distribution significantly. Thus, for accurate design of nano/micro scale high precision and high frequency flexoelectric/piezoelectric devices, flexoelectricity must be taken into consideration.