Vibration modes of flexoelectric circular plate

Abstract

Beams, plates, and shells, as the fundamental mechanical structures, are widely used in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) as sensors, actuators, energy harvesters, and among others. Deeply understand the electromechanical coupling of these dielectric structures is of crucial for designing, fabricating, and optimizing practice devices in these systems. Herein we demonstrate the electromechanical coupling in flexoelectric circular plate, in which higher-order strain gradients were considered to extend the classical electromechanical properties to isotropic materials, in which the non-uniform distribution of the electric potential along the radial direction was considered. Analytical solutions for the vibration modes of the flexoelectric circular plates showed that the dynamic modes were totally different from the piezoelectric circular plates owing to the inversion symmetry breaking by the strain gradient. The electromechanical coupling dynamic modes are sensitive to bending, twisting modes owing to the sensitivity of the flexoelectric effect to bending. This work provides a fundamental understanding of the electromechanical coupling in flexoelectric circular plate, which is helpful in designing novel flexoelectric circular plate-based devices, such as flexoelectric mirrors. [Figure not available: see fulltext.].