M Yiu

This paper deals with a case study for the piezoelectric materials suddenly exposed to an environmental medium of different temperature. The problem is idealized to a plate containing an edge crack or an embedded crack. The stress and electric displacement histories in an uncracked plate are calculated. These stresses and electric displacements are then added to the crack surface tractions and electric displacements with opposite sign to formulate a mixed boundary value problem. The cracking problem is thus reduced to a singular integral equation of Cauchy type, which is then solved numerically. Both impermeable crack assumption and permeable crack assumption are considered. The results for stress and electric displacement intensity factors are computed as a function of normalized time and crack size. Lower bound solutions are obtained for the maximum thermal shock that the material can sustain without catastrophic failure according to the two distinct criteria: The maximum local tensile stress equals the tensile strength of the medium. The maximum stress intensity factor for the pre-existing representative crack equals the fracture toughness of the medium. The parameters that control the transient thermal stress and electric displacement are also identified. The method can be used to explore susceptibility to thermal fracture in piezoelectric materials containing pre-cracks