Evaluation of performance of magneto-electro-elastic sensor subjected to thermal-moisture coupled load via CS-FEM

In the present paper, for the first time, the time-dependent responses of magneto-electro-elastic (MEE) structures in a hygrothermal environment are investigated via the cell-based smoothed finite element method (CS-FEM) in conjunction with the modified Newmark scheme. To verify the effectiveness, convergence, efficiency and the specialty in dealing with distorted elements of the proposed method, mechanical responses of an example of 2D MEE cantilever beam subjected to hygrothermal environment and timed-dependent sawtooth wave load were comprehensively studied. The numerical results obtained by CS-FEM were compared with the finite element method (FEM). Next, we constructed two geometric configurations of MEE sensors and investigated the effect of geometric configuration, MEE patches position, as well as applied mechanical sawtooth load on their time-dependent generalized displacements. A parametric study was conducted to show also the effect of mechanical load in conjunction with thermal and moisture loads on the time-dependent response of MEE-based structures. Comprehensive numerical results illustrate that the thermal and moisture loads have significant influences on the response of MEE structures. Additionally, the MEE patch position directly affects the energy conversion factor. The mechanical response of MEE-based structures in the hygrothermal environment was modified and potentially improved. This study characterizing the MEE material in a hygrothermal environment creates the groundwork for designing MEE-based intelligent structures in an extreme environment.