Thermo-electro-mechanical dynamic fracture analysis on laminated piezoelectric plates

A thermo-electro-mechanical extended layerwise method (TEM-XLWM) is established for the multi-physical dynamic problems of piezoelectric laminates with delaminations or/and transverse cracks. The proposed method is deduced from the thermo-electro-mechanical mixed variational principle. The strong discontinuous functions and classical the extended finite element method (XFEM) are used to model delaminations and the transverse cracks, respectively. The Newmark integration algorithm and Crank–Nicolson scheme are combined to solve the transient multi-physical fields simultaneously. In the numerical example analysis, the proposed dynamic fracture analysis method is verified by a three-dimensional model. The laminated piezoelectric plates with delamination and/or transverse cracks are analyzed and the strain energy release rate (SERR) is calculated based on the virtual crack closure technique (VCCT).