Numerical determination of effective properties of voided piezoelectric materials using BNM

As a type of boundary-only meshless method, boundary node method (BNM) inherently has the advantages of both the boundary element method (BEM) and meshless method. In this paper, a micromechanics BNM algorithm is applied to determine the effective electroelastic properties of transversely isotropic piezoelectric materials containing randomly distributed voids. The two-dimensional (2D) analyses based on fundamental solutions are carried out to investigate the relations between the effective properties and the void volume fraction. Emphasis is placed on the application of BNM to obtain the coupled elastic and electric fields by discretizing the boundaries of the physical domain and further to numerically determine the effective properties of voided piezoelectric materials. Numerical examples show that the results agree well with available numerical solution and known micromechanics model (Mori-Tanaka model).