| Smart structures is a field poised on the brink of making a major impact on our world. The main obstacle to further progress in smart structures is the lack of midrange, high efficiency, tailorable actuators that can be utilized in smart structures designs. An actuator architecture with potential to meet this need is the C-block. The C-block is a curved composite beam that includes one or more piezoelectric layers. When voltage is applied, the piezoelectric material strains and the structure flexes. The C-block can be used individually or as a building block in distributed array architectures. Array architectures have the advantage that they can be tailored using material, geometric, and array configuration parameters to produce output force, deflection, and/or natural frequencies required for a given application, while fitting within the available application space.;To use C-block actuator arrays in smart structures applications, their behavior and limitations must be understood. Therefore, the goal of this research was to derive, test, analyze, and demonstrate simple relationships that govern the performance behavior and limitations of generic C-block actuator architectures. These relationships were analytically derived, reducing the behavior of the complex C-block actuator architecture to analytical models that are easily used by engineers. The analytical models were used to compare the C-block to other piezoelectric actuators, demonstrating the advantages of the C-block architecture in midrange performance and high efficiency.;The performance models were verified by performing a number of experiments on a variety of prototype actuators. This experimentation demonstrated that C-blocks can be physically realized, validated the accuracy of the models over a broad design space, and examined the effect of the material, geometric, and array configuration parameters on the performance output. C-block actuators were also designed for a smart rotor blade flap, demonstrating the utility of the architecture and the design models in a real life application. With their versatility, C-block actuator architectures will enable the smart structures community to design and build structures using better actuators, and thus expand the reaches of current applications of smart structures. |
