Effect of Piezoelectric Actuator Modeling for Wave Generation in LISA

The local interaction simulation approach (LISA), a finite difference based numerical method, has been proven to be efficient in modeling guided wave (GW) propagation in isotropic and composite laminated structures. Recently, the LISA framework has been augmented to incorporate the piezoelectric material directly in the formulation so to more accurately model the transducer effects in the GW generation. This paper presents a study to assess the importance of the actuation modeling from surface-mounted piezoelectric actuators in LISA. Actuation modeling includes the prescribed displacements (either in plane or out of plane) that are commonly found in the literature, as well as the direct modeling of the piezoelectric material of the actuator with prescribed electric potentials. The study is carried out both for isotropic and composite laminated substrates. Numerical and experimental results are used to characterize the quality of the actuator modeling options.