Effective properties of cement-based porous piezoelectric ceramic composites

•Effective thermo-electro-mechanical material properties of cement-based piezoelectric ceramic composites.•The micromechanics representative volume element (RVE) approach is used.•Effects of pore volume fraction on the effective composite properties are determined.•Effects of PZT particle volume fraction on the effective composite properties are determined. In this work, the finite element method (FEM) is used to characterize the effective thermo-electro-mechanical material properties of cement-based porous piezoelectric ceramic composites used in structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. The micromechanics representative volume element (RVE) approach is used with a realistic distribution of piezoelectric particles in the porous cement matrix. The effects of the piezoelectric particle volume fraction and pore volume fraction on the effective composite properties are determined using sets of different boundary conditions. Results show very good agreement with published experimental and computational results.