Conservation Integrals in Nonhomogeneous Materials with Flexoelectricity

The flexoelectricity, which is a new electromechanical coupling phenomenon between strain gradients and electric polarization, has a great influence on the fracture analysis of flexoelectric solids due to the large gradients near the cracks. On the other hand, although the flexoelectricity has been extensively investigated in recent decades, the study on flexoelectricity in nonhomogeneous materials is still rare, especially the fracture problems. Therefore, in this manuscript, the conservation integrals for nonhomogeneous flexoelectric materials are obtained to solve the fracture problem. Application of operators such as grad, div, and curl to electric Gibbs free energy and internal energy, the energy-momentum tensor, angular momentum tensor, and dilatation flux can also be derived. We examine the correctness of the conservation integrals by comparing with the previous work and discuss the operator method here and Noether theorem in the previous work. Finally, considering the flexoelectric effect, a nonhomogeneous beam problem with crack is solved to show the application of the conservation integrals.