Modeling of electrodynamic-mechanical coupling phenomena in smart magnetoelectroelastic materials

The coupling of electric, magnetic and mechanical phenomena may have various reasons. The famous Maxwell equations of electrodynamics describe the interaction of transient magnetic and electric fields. On the constitutive level of dielectric materials, coupling mechanisms are manyfold comprising piezoelectric, magnetostrictive or magnetoelectric effects. Electromagnetically induced specific forces acting at the boundary and within the domain of a dielectric body are, within a continuum mechanics framework, commonly denoted as Maxwell stresses. In transient electromagnetic fields, the Poynting vector gives another contribution to mechanical stresses. First, a system of transient partial differential equations is presented. Introducing scalar and vector potentials for the electromagnetic fields and representing the mechanical strain by displacement fields, seven coupled differential equations govern the boundary value problem, accounting for linear constitutive equations of magnetoelectroelasticity. To reduce the effort of numerical solution, the system of equations is partly decoupled applying generalized forms of Coulomb and Lorenz gauge transformations 1,2]. A weak formulation is given to establish a basis for a finite element solution. The influence of constitutive magnetoelectric coupling on electromagnetic wave propagation is finally demonstrated with a simple one-dimensional example. (© 2015 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)