Size-dependent effect on thermo-electro-mechanical responses of heated nano-sized piezoelectric plate

The booming development of nanotechnology motivates the widespread applications of piezoelectric nanomaterials (e.g. ZnO, ZnS, GaN) and their nanostructures (e.g. nanobelts, nanorings nanowires). It is noted that the coupled field analysis of nano-sized piezoelectric structure under non-uniform temperature in-service environment is of great importance for the fabrication and exploitation of nanoelectromechanical devices. In such situation, spatial size effect of heat conduction is necessary to be taken into account due to its important significance in characterizing the nonlocal feature of heat transport in nanosystems. In this study, thermal nonlocal effect is introduced into the thermo-electro-mechanical model based on nonlocal elasticity theory to further shed light on the size-dependent coupling behavior of thermal, electric, and elastic fields. The coupled field equations involving size-dependent parameters are derived. The solutions can be obtained using Laplace transformation methods. Parametric studies are conducted to evaluate the influences of thermal as well as elastic nonlocal parameters on the transient responses. The results indicate that the piezoelectric performance of the nanoplate is greatly improved in the presence of thermal nonlocal effect.