A crack with surface effects in a piezoelectric material

Abstract

We study the contribution of surface piezoelectricity to the anti-plane deformations of a hexagonal piezoelectric material weakened by a crack. The surface piezoelectricity is incorporated by using an extended version of the continuum-based surface/interface model of Gurtin and Murdoch. The original boundary value problem is finally reduced to a system of two coupled first-order Cauchy singular integro-differential equations by considering a distribution of line dislocations and electric-potential-dislocations on the crack. Through a diagonalization strategy, the coupled system can be transformed into two independent singular integro-differential equations, each of which contains only one single unknown function and can be numerically solved by the collocation method. Our solution demonstrates that the stresses, strains, electric displacements and electric displacements exhibit the logarithmic singularity at the crack tips. The obtained solution is further used to predict the size-dependent effective electroelastic properties of a piezoelectric solid containing multiple nanocracks with surface piezoelectricity within the framework of non-interaction approximation.