Effect of thermal uncertainty on piezoelectric control of doubly curved bimorph shell: acoustic characteristics

In this work, the sound transmission loss (STL) of a simply supported doubly curved shallow aluminum shell covered by two layers of piezoelectric material, PZT-5H is presented. The study takes into account the presence of uncertain ambient temperature which is shown to significantly affect piezoelectric control of sound transmission. To derive the equations of motion, the assumed mode method combined with the first-order shear deformation theory and Hamilton's principles are employed. The modeling process incorporates the ambient temperature and thoroughly investigates its effects on STL, vibrational displacement, and piezoelectric voltage in terms of thermal strain, piezoelectric constants, and the pyroelectric coefficient uncertainties. Results show that uncertainty in environmental temperature significantly affects STL uncertainty up to 10% and vibrational displacement of the shell to the 15 times of its lowest value. The piezoelectric voltage also fluctuates with the variation in the temperature in a maximum range of 0.12–5.2 Volt. Further, the piezoelectric sensing voltage which accounts for the piezoelectric sensor thickness is observed to be highly sensitive to the temperature uncertainty with a maximum range of 0.65–7.6 Volt, causing depolarization and hysteresis nonlinearity. Thus, environmental temperature variation is considered as one of the main uncertain aspects for robust sound transmission controller. The proposed study provides an insightful investigation for robust piezoelectric control of STL in the presence of thermal uncertainty.