%0 Journal Article %T Active Constrained Layer Damping of Smart Skew Laminated Composite Plates Using 1¨C3 Piezoelectric Composites %A R. M. Kanasogi %A M. C. Ray %J Journal of Composites %D 2013 %R 10.1155/2013/824163 %X This paper deals with the analysis of active constrained layer damping (ACLD) of smart skew laminated composite plates. The constraining layer of the ACLD treatment is composed of the vertically/obliquely reinforced 1¨C3 piezoelectric composites (PZCs). A finite element model has been developed for accomplishing the task of the active constrained layer damping of skew laminated symmetric and antisymmetric cross-ply and antisymmetric angle-ply composite plates integrated with the patches of such ACLD treatment. Both in-plane and out-of-plane actuations by the constraining layer of the ACLD treatment have been utilized for deriving the finite element model. The analysis revealed that the vertical actuation dominates over the in-plane actuation. Particular emphasis has been placed on investigating the performance of the patches when the orientation angle of the piezoelectric fibers of the constraining layer is varied in the two mutually orthogonal vertical planes. Also, the effects of varying the skew angle of the substrate laminated composite plates and different boundary conditions on the performance of the patches have been studied. The analysis reveals that the vertically and the obliquely reinforced 1¨C3 PZC materials should be used for achieving the best control authority of ACLD treatment, as the boundary conditions of the smart skew laminated composite plates are simply supported and clamped-clamped, respectively. 1. Introduction Extensive research on the use of piezoelectric materials for making distributed actuators and sensors of light weight flexible smart structures has been carried out during the past several years [1¨C16]. The distributed piezoelectric actuators and sensors are either mounted on or embedded into the host flexible light weight structures. When they are activated with proper control voltage, the resulting structures attain self-controlling and self-sensing capabilities. Such flexible structures having built-in mechanism for self-controlling and self-sensing capabilities are customarily called ¡°smart structures.¡± In most of the work on smart structures, the distributed actuators were considered to be made of the existing monolithic piezoelectric materials. The magnitudes of the piezoelectric coefficients of the existing monolithic piezoelectric materials are very small. Hence, the distributed actuators made of these materials need large control voltage for satisfactory control of smart structures. The further research on the efficient use of these low-control authority monolithic piezoelectric materials led to the development of %U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jcomp/2013/824163/