The transient response of a piezoelectric strip with a vertical crack under electromechanical impact load (Q1580946)

The authors investigate transient response of a piezoelectric strip with a crack perpendicular to its surfaces, to an antiplane mechanical and an inplane electric impact loadings. The impermeable crack condition is adopted. This linear problem is decomposed into two simpler problems following well-known guidelines, one concerning the electromechanical impact on the uncracked strip, and the other for the cracked strip with prescribed impact loadings at the crack surfaces. Using Laplace transform technique, the solution in transformed domain is reduced to the solution of Fredholm dual integral equations of the second kind, through which the stress and electric field intensity factors could be expressed. Examination of the obtained formulae shows that the dynamic electric displacement intensity factor is not affected by the applied mechanical load. The numerical results indicate that this factor initially develops slowly as the crack length increases up to a value of 0.4, beyond which the increase becomes rapid. The authors also demonstrate that the electric field will retard or promote the crack propagation at different stages of the impact loading process, according to the dimensionless crack length and the normalized impact load.