Fracture analysis in piezoelectric semiconductors under a thermal load

•Dynamic fracture analysis in piezoelectric semiconductors is presented.•Transient thermal loadings are considered.•A MLPG method is developed and the local integral equations are derived.•The Houbolt finite-difference scheme is applied for time integration.•The influence of initial electron density on the intensity factors is investigated.

In this paper, we solve the in-plane crack problem in piezoelectric semiconductors under a transient thermal load. General boundary conditions and sample geometry are allowed in the proposed formulation. The coupled governing partial differential equations (PDE) for stresses, electric displacement field and current are satisfied in a local weak-form on small fictitious subdomains. All field quantities are approximated by the moving least-squares (MLS) scheme. After performing the spatial integrations, we obtain a system of ordinary differential equations for the nodal unknowns. The influence of initial electron density on the intensity factors and energy release rate is investigated.