Crack Analysis of Piezoelectric Material Considering Bounded Uncertain Material Properties

Piezoelectric materials are widely used to construct smart or adaptive structures. Although extensive efforts have been devoted to the analysis of piezoelectric materials in recent years, most researches have been conducted by assuming that the material properties are fixed and have no uncertainties. Intrinsically, material properties have a certain amount of scatter and such uncertainties can affect the performance of component. In this paper, the convex modeling is used to consider such uncertainties in calculating the crack extension force of piezoelectric material and the results are compared with the one obtained via the Monte Carlo simulation. Numerical results show that crack extension forces increase when uncertainties considered, which indicates that such uncertainties should not be ignored for reliable lifetime prediction. Also, the results obtained by the convex modeling and the Monte Carlo simulation show good agreement, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the convex modeling.