Modelling of the electromechanical coupling between crack propagation and piezoelectric behavior in active layers of smart device

In this paper a new computational approach is investigated to predict the crack propagation inside some smart structures equipped with surface bonded piezoelectric layers, meanwhile the electromechanical coupling is exploited. The current industrial need of analyzing even rather irregular geometries motivates resorting to a numerical approach. Therefore the Finite Element Method (FEM) is used to predict both the fracture behavior and the coupled response of piezoelectric material, through a suitable interoperation of the two computational environments, available in some commercial code like the ABAQUS©. The two solutions are then coupled by means of a subroutine, in this case operated through the ISIGHT© tool. After a preliminary analysis and a validation, results of some numerical simulations are shown to highlight some significant peculiarities of the coupled behavior of the piezoelectric material