A fast BEM for the analysis of plates with bonded piezoelectric patches

In this paper a fast boundary element method for the elastodynamic analysis of 3D structures with bonded piezoelectric patches is presented. The elastodynamic analysis is performed in the Laplace domain and the time history of the relevant quantities is obtained by inverse Laplace transform. The bonded patches are modelled using a semi-analytical state-space variational approach. The computational features of the technique, in terms of required storage memory and solution time, are improved by a fast solver based on the use of hierarchical matrices. The presented numerical results show the potential of the technique in the study of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems.