Crack interaction study in piezoelectric materials under thermo-electro-mechanical loading environment

Multiple voids and cracks were generated during material processing techniques, which interact with each other and affects the service performance of piezoelectric components. This work aims to study the behavior of piezoelectric components in presence of multiple cracks under thermo-electro-mechanical loading environment. Extended finite element method has been implemented to model geometrical discontinuities with crack interaction phenomenon. In this work, thermo-electro- mechanical problem has been decoupled into thermal and electro-elastic problems. Temperature distribution has been obtained by solving heat conduction equation and then used as an input to the electro-elastic problem. In post processing phase, interaction integral method and generalized Stroh formalism were used to predict the stress intensity factors. The methodology has been implemented with in-house developed MATLAB code. Set of cases for crack interaction studies were presented using the proposed approach.