Executive Summary : | smart materials are essential for enhancing the life and reliability of smart structures and equipment. Fracture analysis is crucial to understand the reasons for failures, and nonlinear fracture models like Ps or EMPs and DB or EMDB models were proposed for piezoelectric or MEE materials. These models were developed to address the lack of agreement between linear fracture mechanics theory and experimental findings under applied electrical loadings. A new fracture parameter, local energy release rate, was defined in these models, which complied with experimental results.
However, cracks in practical situations are of the order of the geometry's dimensions, necessitating the study of cracks on a finite domain using numerical techniques. XFEM, a fast-developing numerical technique, is proposed to study crack problems in these materials based on the Ps or EMPs model. However, fracture analysis of smart materials using XFEM is not yet available in many software packages. The proposed approach involves implementing crack-face conditions using 1-D dummy elements along the crack path for evaluating the line integral present in the variational formulation of the problem. |