• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.221-237
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• 2022

This paper is concerned with nonlinear modeling and efficient numerical simulation of electrostrictive materials and structures. Two types of such materials are considered: relaxor ferroelectric ceramics and electrostrictive polymers. For ceramics, a geometrically linear formulation is developed, whereas polymers are studied in a geometrically nonlinear regime. In the paper, we focus on constitutive modeling first. For the reversible constitutive response under consideration, we introduce the augmented Helmholtz free energy, which is composed of a purely elastic part, a dielectric part and an augmentation term. For the elastic part, we involve an additive decomposition of the strain tensor into an elastic strain and an electrostrictive eigenstrain, which depends on the polarization of the material. In the geometrically nonlinear case, a corresponding multiplicative decomposition of the deformation gradient tensor replaces the additive strain decomposition used in the geometrically linear formulation. For the dielectric part, we first introduce the internal energy, to which a Legendre transformation is applied to compute the free energy. The augmentation term accounts for the contribution from vacuum to the energy. In our formulation, the augmented free energy depends not only on the strain and the electric field, but also on the polarization and an internal polarization; the latter two are internal variables. With the constitutive framework established, a Finite Element implementation is briefly discussed. We use high-order elements for the discretization of the independent variables, which include also the internal variables and, in case the material is assumed incompressible, the hydrostatic pressure, which is introduced as a Lagrange multiplier. The elements are implemented in the open source code Netgen/NGSolve. Finally, example problems are solved for both, relaxor ferroelectric ceramics and electrostrictive polymers. We focus on thin plate-type structures to show the efficiency of the numerical scheme and its applicability to thin electrostrictive structures.