Evaluation of piezoelectric and mechanical properties of the piezoelectric composites with local damages

Microscopic voids/defects always occur in brittle piezoelectric fiber during the preparation. In addition, inconsistent material properties between the reinforced fibers and the matrix led to some microcracks located at the interface in matrix materials. In order to obtain equivalent properties of piezoelectric composites with respect to initial voids/defects, a parametric microscopic finite-volume model was constructed in this paper. To this end, the mechanical-electric coupling constitutive relation was implanted into the parametric FVDAM model to describe their piezoelectric characteristics. To verify the presented coupled mechanical-electric model, the numerical results of local stress and electric field distributions acquired by finite element method were also indicated for a comparison. On this basis, equivalent modulus and equivalent electrical properties with full consideration of local damages were also investigated by the presented microscale model.