Multistate transitions in bistable composite plates with and without broken orthogonal symmetry

Journal article

Authors/Editors

Strategic Research Themes

Publication Details

Author list: Tichakorn K.; Aimmanee S.

Publisher: Elsevier

Publication year: 2025

Journal acronym: TWS

Volume number: 211

ISSN: 0263-8231

eISSN: 1879-3223

URL: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85218886672&doi=10.1016%2fj.tws.2025.113078&partnerID=40&md5=4e6228b67fcb6aa21afc10bd1e578ffd

Languages: English-Great Britain (EN-GB)

View on publisher site

Abstract

Symmetry breaking in the elastic instability of thin-walled structures has become a prominent topic in nonlinear science. In composite structures, this phenomenon can arise from various factors, such as non-uniform thickness, directional anisotropy, and material and geometric imperfections. Typically, symmetry breaking in bistable composite plates and shells manifests through the loss of bifurcation. However, bifurcation can be restored at critical points by precisely tuning external stimuli to counteract asymmetric behaviors. This study investigates the mechanisms behind the loss and recovery of bifurcation, aiming to achieve multistate transitions, including stable and snap-through transitions between two stable equilibria in both square and rectangular thermo-electro-elastic composite plates. The stability relationships are explored using a novel duplex Hamiltonian formalism, which surpasses the previous methodologies by integrating in-plane eigen-solutions from two permutating symplectic spaces. The out-of-plane displacement field is incorporated into the extremum conditions of the Hamiltonian energy density to ensure overall equilibrium. By selecting appropriate ratios of eigen-solutions from both symplectic spaces, this method achieves high accuracy in displacement and stress fields with rapid convergence. The duplex Hamiltonian framework can be utilized to efficiently generate three-dimensional stability diagrams, illustrating the folding equilibrium surfaces of deformation and energy in piezoelectric fiber-reinforced plates. These diagrams reveal the loss of bifurcation in square plates and the occurrence of pitchfork bifurcation in rectangular plates under electrical actions, offering several unintuitive alternative shape-changing strategies. This study provides a robust and adaptable analytical methodology for constructing morphological pathways in multistate transitions, identifying the minimum energy barrier and energy-efficient transition paths within nonlinear structural continua. © 2025 Elsevier Ltd

Keywords

No matching items found.