SBFEM for fracture analysis of piezoelectric composites under thermal load

This paper extends a semi-analytical technique, the so-called scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM), to analyze fracture behaviors of piezoelectric materials and piezoelectric composites under thermal loading. In this method, only the boundary is discretized leading to a reduction of the spatial dimension by one. The temperature field in the domain is obtained using the SBFEM and expressed as a series of power functions of the radial coordinate. The resulting stress and electric displacement distribution along the radial direction is represented analytically. This permits the generalized stress and electric displacement intensity factors to be directly evaluated from the solution by following standard stress recovery procedures in the finite element method (FEM). Numerical examples are presented to verify the proposed technique with the analytical solutions and the results from the literature. The present results highlight the accuracy, simplicity and efficiency of the proposed technique.