Numerical modeling of thermo-electro-viscoelasticity with field-dependent material parameters

In this contribution, we propose a mathematical framework and its numerical implementation for thermo-electro-viscoelasticity taking into account field-dependence of the relevant material parameters appearing in the constitutive model. Polymeric materials are typically viscoelastic and highly susceptible to thermal fluctuations. Several experimental studies suggest that major material parameters appearing in a constitutive model of a thermo-electro-mechanically coupled problem evolve with respect to temperature as well as the applied electric field. Hence we propose a framework for the realistic modeling of polymeric materials under coupled thermo-electro-mechanical loads in which the temperature and electric field are not only considered as independent fields but also show an effect on the material parameters. Furthermore we present the numerical discretization of the coupled balance laws within the context of the finite element method. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed thermo-electro-mechanically coupled framework, several boundary value problems are solved numerically.