An alternative approach to establishment of a variational principle for the torsional problem of piezoelastic beams

The semi-inverse method is adopted to search for a variational principle for an un-electroded piezoelastic beam. A trial variational formulation with energy integral is constructed with an unknown function, which is identified so that the Euler-Lagrange equations are equivalent to the governing equations. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.