Moving Dugdale type crack along the interface of two dissimilar piezoelectric materials

•Interfacial Dugdale crack between dissimilar piezoelectric materials.•Yield zone size and crack sliding displacement are obtained.•Electric loading affects the crack propagation.

In this paper we extend the concept of Dugdale crack model and Yoffe model to propose a moving Dugdale interfacial crack model, and the interfacial crack between dissimilar piezoelectric materials under anti-plane electro-mechanical loading is investigated considering the electro-mechanical nonlinearity. It is assumed that the constant moving crack is electrically permeable and the length of the crack keeps constant. Fourier transform is applied to reduce the mixed boundary value problem of the crack to dual integral equations, which are solved exactly. The explicit expression of the yield zone size is derived and the crack sliding displacement has been explicitly obtained. The results show that both the stress and electric field in the cracked piezoelectric material are of finite value and the crack sliding displacement is dependent on the loading, material properties and crack moving velocity. The static interfacial crack problem can be recovered when the moving velocity is zero.