Fracture Analysis of Griffith Interface Crack in Fine-Grained Piezoelectric Coating/Substrate under Thermal Loading

Coating often plays a role in monitoring and protecting substrates in engineering applications. Interface cracks between the coating and the substrate can lead to crack growth under the action of external loading and will cause device failure. In this paper, the behavior of a fine-grained piezoelectric coating/substrate with a Griffith interface crack under steady-state thermal loading is studied. The temperature field, displacement field, and electric field of the coupling of thermal and electromechanical problems are constructed via integral transformation and the principle of superposition. Thus, problems are transformed into a system of singular integral equations, and the expressions of thermal intensity factor, thermal stress intensity factor, and electric displacement intensity factor are obtained. We used a numerical calculation and a system of singular equations to obtain the relationship of strength factor with material parameters, coating thickness, and crack size.