Copyright © 2011 J. H. Zhang and W. Zhang. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We investigate the global bifurcations and multipulse chaotic dynamics of a simply supported laminated composite piezoelectric rectangular thin plate under combined parametric and transverse excitations. We analyze directly the nonautonomous governing equations of motion for the laminated composite piezoelectric rectangular thin plate. The results obtained here indicate that the multipulse chaotic motions can occur in the laminated composite piezoelectric rectangular thin plate. Numerical simulations including the phase portraits and Lyapunov exponents are used to analyze the complex nonlinear dynamic behaviors of the laminated composite piezoelectric rectangular thin plate.