Buckling and post-buckling analysis of delaminated piezo-composite material under electro-mechanical loading

In this article, an analytical investigation of the stability behavior (i.e. buckling and post-buckling) of rectangular cross-ply piezo-laminate through the width delamination is performed. The piezo-layers act as an actuator in this study. The Rayleigh–Ritz method is used, and the displacement fields are obtained by incorporating polynomial series. The minimum potential energy principle is applied to achieve the equations analytically which are subsequently solved by using the Newton–Raphson iterative procedure. Comparison is made between the obtained results with those gathered by finite element analysis, and good agreement is observed. This method is demonstrated to be quite capable of predicting buckling and post-buckling analysis of delaminated piezo-composite materials.