The topic of piezoelectric active thin-walled structures has attracted a great deal of attention over the previous couple of decades. Lightweight structures with piezoelectric material based active elements, sensors and actuators, offer numerous advantages over their passive counterparts. This explains the motivation of authors to dedicate their work to this enticing research field. Accurate and reliable numerical tools for modeling and simulation of this type of structures is still a hot topic in the research community. This paper offers an isogeometric finite element formulation for shell type of structures made of composite laminates including piezoelectric layers characterized by the electro-mechanical coupling. The shell kinematics is based on the Mindlin-Reissner assumptions, thus including the transverse shear effects. A few examples selected from the available literature are considered to demonstrate the applicability of the developed numerical tool and assess its performance.
Milić et al. (Tue,) studied this question.