Radial vibration analysis for functionally graded ring piezoelectric transducers based on electromechanical equivalent circuit method.

Ring piezoelectric transducers (rPETs) have attracted multitudinous attentions due to their widespread applications in hydro-acoustic engineering, structural health monitoring, and energy harvesting. However, cracks are inevitably occurred by the concentrated stress at the interface between metal and piezoelectric ceramics, which will seriously affect the performance and service life of the devices. Hence, a novel functionally graded ring piezoelectric transducer (FG-rPET) has been designed and an accurate analytical system is constructed mainly including a three-port electromechanical equivalent circuit model (EECM) which can acquire exact solutions in radial vibration. In addition, the proposed three-port EECM has excellent generalizability, which is also applicable to conventional rPETs. The validity of the EECM is verified by experiments and the finite element method. The vibration characteristics (resonance/anti-resonance frequencies and effective electromechanical coupling coefficient (k)) with fundamental and second modes for the FG-rPETs can be regulated via the inhomogeneity index and wall thickness. Markedly enhanced k at second modes can be obtained for the FG-rPETs with specific wall thicknesses. The proposed analytical system has important guiding significance for structure optimization design of piezoelectric devices, and the designed FG-rPET is expected to break the bottleneck of mechanical properties for the conventional rPETs.