Subinterface crack in an anisotropic piezoelectric bimaterial

In this paper, the problem of a subinterface crack in an anisotropic piezoelectric bimaterial is analyzed. A system of singular integral equations is formulated for general anisotropic piezoelectric bimaterial with kernel functions expressed in complex form. For commonly used transversely isotropic piezoelectric materials, the kernel functions are given in real forms. By considering special properties of one of the bimaterial, various real kernel functions for half-plane problems with mechanical traction-free or displacement-fixed boundary conditions combined with different electric boundary conditions are obtained. Investigations of half-plane piezoelectric solids show that, particularly for the mechanical traction-free problem, the evaluations of the mechanical stress intensity factors (electric displacement intensity factor) under mechanical loadings (electric displacement loading) for coupled mechanical and electric problems may be evaluated directly by considering the corresponding decoupled elastic (electric) problem irrespective of what electric boundary condition is applied on the boundary. However, for the piezoelectric bimaterial problem, purely elastic bimaterial analysis or purely electric bimaterial analysis is inadequate for the determination of the generalized stress intensity factors. Instead, both elastic and electric properties of the bimaterial’s constants should be simultaneously taken into account for better accuracy of the generalized stress intensity factors.