Thermal and Electroelastic Behavior of Piezocomposites and Inhomogeneous Piezoelectric Materials with Voids

This article presents an incremental self-consistent model that is used to optimize two kinds of thermoelectroelastic composites: polymer/ceramic and ceramic/void. The modeling is based on the heterogeneous inclusion problem of Eshelby, which leads to an expression for the strain−electric field relation by integral equations. The solution of these equations leads to expressions for electroelastic concentration tensors based on a micromechanical model. The overall thermal and electroelastic behavior of the composites considered can be estimated by means of these concentration tensors. An incremental self-consistent scheme is introduced that improves upon the classical self-consistent model for piezoelectric composites. Predictions using this scheme are compared to predictions based on the Mori−Tanaka and self-consistent models of the thermal and electroelastic behavior of inhomogeneous piezoelectric materials with and without void inclusions. The effects of poling direction and inclusion shape are discussed.