Analysis of a permeable interface crack in elastic dielectric/piezoelectric bimaterials

A permeable interface crack between elastic dielectric material and piezoelectric material is studied based on the extended Stroh’s formalism. Motivated by strong engineering demands to design new composite materials, the authors perform numerical analysis of interface crack tip singularities and the crack tip energy release rates for 35 types of dissimilar bimaterials, respectively, which are constructed by five kinds of elastic dielectric materials: Epoxy, Polymer, Al₂O₃, SiC, and Si₃N₄ and seven kinds of practical piezoelectric ceramics: PZT-4, BaTiO₃, PZT-5H, PZT-6B, PZT-7A, P-7, and PZT-PIC 151, respectively. The elastic dielectric material with much smaller permittivity than commercial piezoelectric ceramics is treated as a special transversely isotropic piezoelectric material with extremely small piezoelectricity. The present investigation shows that the structure of the singular field near the permeable interface crack tip consists of three singularities: and , which is quite different from that in the impermeable interface crack. It can be concluded that different far field loading cases have significant influence on the near-tip fracture behaviors of the permeable interface crack. Based on the present theoretical treatment and numerical analysis, the electric field induced crack growth is well explained, which provides a better understanding of the failure mechanism induced from interface crack growth in elastic dielectric/piezoelectric bimaterials. The project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10572110), Doctor Foundation of the Chinese Education Ministry and Doctorate Foundation of Xi’an Jiaotong University. The English text was polished by Yunming Chen.