Exact Solutions for Simply Supported and Multilayered Piezothermoelastic Plates with Imperfect Interfaces

Exact solutions are derived for three-dimensional, orthotropic, linearly piezothermoelastic, simply-supported, and multilayered rectangular plates with imperfect interfaces under static thermo-electro-mechanical loadings. In this research the imperfect interface is described as thermally weakly (or highly) conducting, mechanically compliant and dielectrically weakly (or highly) conducting. While the homogeneous solutions for one layer are obtained in terms of the socalled pseudo-Stroh formalism, solutions for multilayered plates are expressed in terms of the transfer matrices for both the layer and the imperfect interface. Due to the fact that the thermal effect is incorporated, we adopt a special form of the transfer matrix, resulting in a very concise solution structure for piezothermoelastic multilayered plates. Numerical results are presented to validate the developed formulas and to demonstrate the influence of the interface imperfection on the distributions of the field variables.