A coupled electromechanical analysis of a piezoelectric layer bonded to an elastic substrate. I: Development of governing equations. (Q1430827)

The authors study the coupled electromechanical static behaviour of a piezoelectric thin layer with the poling direction bonded to a half-infinite elastic substrate. The piezoelectric layer is free of the mechanical loading and subjected to either the free charge or the electric potential on the surfaces. The linear elastic substrate is mechanically loaded in tension or compression via the remote axial strain. With the usual plane strain assumption, the electromechanical fields of the layer are expanded in the thickness coordinate. The mechanical fields of the substrate are expressed by the exact solutions for the half-plane subjected to a concentrated force on the surface. The boundary value problem for the bimaterial is governed by two differential equations and two singular integral equations together with the associated boundary conditions. The problem is alternatively expressed in variational form by an extension of the Hellinger-Reissner variational principle in piezoelectricity. The authors overlook the variational principles available in piezoelectricity and thermopiezoelectricity. Some numerical applications of the static analysis are reported in a follow-up paper.