Hello everyone.

I am trying to solve the problem of a piezoelectric bimorph that has a
time-varying (sinusoidal) input voltage which I apply only at one end
to electrodes that have low conductivity. You might suggest I assume
uniform voltage distribution, meaning metal electrodes, except that I
am studying polymer electrodes which don't have high conductivity.
There is major amplitude decay and also a phase lag as one goes along
the length of the electrodes. Obviously, in ANSYS 8.1 I can't just have
a piezo element like SOLID5 and have SOLID231 for the electrodes
because ANSYS won't let me have those two elements in the same model
since they're  not compatible (solid5 uses charge and solid231 uses
current). I don't know of a good way to solve this problem. Does anyone
have any idea?

If you don't have any ideas about this problem, I have a simpler one.
If instead of having a piezoelectric material between the two
electrodes I have a plain dielectric, how can I calculate the voltage
everywhere in the electrode and in the dielectric material. It seems I
could just have something like air between the electrodes with a
specified dielectric constant for the air. In this simple problem I
don't need to know polarization\ or surface charge density. The
analytical solution is simple, with voltage varying linearly from
bottom to top. I can't even seem to find an 'air' element to use with
my conductive element. I have used solid231 with really high
resistivity as the dielectric, but of course that's just a bad solution
since ANSYS bases the voltage drop on a current, and in a dielectric
it's due to a surface charge density. Anyone have ideas for this one?

Thanks.

- Laura Lediaev