Abstract—This paper presents a numerical solution, namely limit and shakedown analysis, to predict the safety state of smart structures made of heterogeneous materials under unknown cyclic loadings, for instance, the flexure hinge in the micro-positioning stage driven by piezoelectric actuator. In combination of homogenization theory and finite-element method (FEM), the safety evaluation proble...

To lower the operating voltage and improve the output performance of piezoelectric actuators, a multilayer monolithic ultrasonic linear piezoelectric actuator was analyzed with the method of finite element analysis (FEA), and a prototype was fabricated and experimentally researched in this study. Experimental results show that the actuator with a multilayer piezoelectric lead zirconate titanate...

The 12th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad hoc and Sensor Systems (IEEE MASS 2015) will be held in Dallas, Texas, USA, October 19 – 22, 2015. Wireless ad hoc communication, Internet of Things, and mobile computing have applications in a variety of environments, such as smart homes, hospitals, battlefields, and disaster-recovery operations. Wireless sensor and actuator networks are bein...

Electrostrictive materials, hard ceramics and soft polymers, have been used as precision actuators in many engineering applications. This study is to examine bang–bang control performance of a hybrid Plexiglas beam laminated with polymeric electrostrictive (RTV 270) actuator and piezoelectric polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) sensor layers using both analytical and experimental techniques. Materia...

The purpose of this paper is control of simply supported flexible core sandwich beam's linear vibration equipped with piezoelectric patches under different loads. The effects of external forces imposed on sandwich beam can be reached to a minimum value by designing an appropriate controller and control the beam's vibration. Three-layer sandwich beam theory is used for analytical modeling of san...

"Smart Pavement" is an emerging infrastructure for various on-road applications in transportation and road engineering. However, existing road monitoring solutions demand a certain periodic maintenance effort due to battery life limits in the sensor systems. To this end, we present an end-to-end self-powered wireless sensor-ePave-to facilitate smart and autonomous pavements. The ePave system in...

The Smart Surface project aims at designing an integrated micro-manipulator based on an array of micromodules connected with a 2D array topology network. Each micromodule comprises a sensor, an actuator and a processing unit. One of the aims of the processing unit is to differentiate the shape of the part that is put on top of the Smart Surface. From a set of shapes this differentiation is done...

Advances in electronics nowadays facilitate the design of smart spaces based on physical mash-ups of sensor and actuator devices. At the same time, software paradigms such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Web of Things (WoT) are motivating the creation of technology to support the development and deployment of web-enabled embedded sensor and actuator devices with two major objectives: (i) to int...

In this paper, we present mathematical analyses to consider the effect of material properties on the sensitivity of the Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) piezoelectric hydrophone and improve the sensitivity by choosing the proper material. The selected structure in the present paper is a piezoelectric hydrophone able to work at low frequencies. The piezoelectric hydrophones are widely used ...