A Unified Analysis for the Free Vibration of the Sandwich Piezoelectric Laminated Beam with General Boundary Conditions under the Thermal Environment

This article mainly analyzes the free vibration characteristic of the sandwich piezoelectric beam under elastic boundary conditions and thermal environment. According to the first-order shear deformation theory and Hamilton’s principle, the thermo-electro-elastic coupling equations of the sandwich piezoelectric beam are obtained. Meanwhile, elastic boundary conditions composed of an array of springs are introduced, and the displacement variables and external potential energy of the beam are expressed as wave functions. By using the method of reverberation-ray matrix to integrate and solve the governing equations, a search algorithm based on golden-section search is introduced to calculate the required frequency parameters. A series of numerical results are compared with those reported in literature studies and obtained by simulation software to verify the correctness and versatility of the search algorithm. In addition, three parametric research cases are proposed to investigate the frequency parameters of sandwich piezoelectric beams with elastic restraint conditions, material parameters, thickness ratio, different temperature rises, and external electric potential.