Saint-Venant End Effects in Anti-plane Shear for Classes of Linear Piezoelectric Materials

Abstract

This paper is concerned with further investigation of the effect of mechanical/electrical coupling on the decay of Saint-Venant end effects in linear piezoelectricity. Saint-Venant's principle and related results for elasticity theory have received considerable attention in the literature but relatively little is known about analogous issues in piezoelectricity. The current rapidly developing smart structures technology provides motivation for the investigation of such problems. The decay of Saint-Venant end effects is investigated in the context of anti-plane shear deformations for linear homogeneous piezoelectric solids. For a rather general class of anisotropic piezoelectric materials, the governing partial differential equations of equilibrium are a coupled system of second-order partial differential equations for the mechanical displacement u and electric potential ϕ. The traction boundary-value problem with prescribed surface charge can be formulated as an oblique derivative boundary-value problem for this elliptic system. Energy-decay estimates using differential inequality methods are used to study the axial decay of solutions on a semi-infinite strip subjected to non-zero boundary conditions only at the near end. This analysis is carried out for a rather general class of materials (the tetragonal \({\bar 4}\) crystal class). The boundary-value problem involves a full coupling of mechanical and electrical effects. There are four independent material constants appearing in the problem. An explicit estimated decay rate (a lower bound for the actual decay rate) is obtained in terms of two dimensionless piezoelectric parameters d0,r, the first of which provides a measure of the degree of piezoelectric coupling. The estimated decay rate is shown to be monotone decreasing with increasing values of the coupling parameter d0. In the limit as d0→0, we recover the exact decay rate for the purely mechanical case. Thus, for the tetragonal \({\bar 4}\) class of materials, piezoelectric end effects are predicted to penetrate further into the strip than their elastic counterparts, confirming recent results obtained in other contexts in linear piezoelectricity.