The static behaviors study of magneto-electro-elastic materials under hygrothermal environment with multi-physical cell-based smoothed finite element method

Abstract The distinctive advantage of magneto-electro-elastic (MEE) materials is their capability to convert energy among elastic, electric and magnetic fields. The multi-physical coupling characteristic of MEE material is affected by the hygrothermal environment. The current research on the MEE structure proprieties remains the use of deterministic finite element (FE) simulations. However, the limitations of FEM such as poor accuracy when using linear triangular/tetrahedral elements, auto-generate elements difficulty when using quadrilateral/hexahedral elements are obstacles to their researches on multi-physical characteristic of precision intelligent structures. Here we proposed the multi-physical cell-based smoothed finite element method (MCS-FEM), a superior calculation in which the strain smoothing technique is utilized. The method is well applied to explore the multi-physical coupling problems. Numerical experiments explored the accuracy, convergence and efficiency of the MCS-FEM. The hygrothermal impacts on the MEE structures were demonstrated by presenting the variation of generalized displacements (x- and z-direction displacement components, electric and magnetic potential). The influences of temperature and moisture dependent elastic stiffness coefficients, boundary condition and structural configuration on MEE structure performance were analyzed. We expect that the methods and simulation results in this paper will benefit future research in investigating the coupled multi-physical problem, and contribute to the design of intelligence structures in service.