Crack analyses in porous piezoelectric brittle materials by the SBFEM

The scaled boundary-finite element method (SBFEM) is employed to analyze cracks in porous piezoelectric solids. A large (magistral) crack and a short crack emanating from a single pore are analyzed. These cracks with their tips in the solid skeleton have the weakening effects on the fracture strength. The crack tip region is considered as a subdomain where both the crack tip and pores are modeled inside the piezoelectric skeleton. The remaining part of the analyzed domain is modeled with effective material properties obtained from the analysis on the representative volume element (RVE). A regular distribution of circular voids is considered in the numerical analyses. The scaled boundary-finite element method (SBFEM) is applied to solve all the boundary value problems.