Mode III fracture analysis of piezoelectric materials by Trefftz BEM

Applications of the Trefftz boundary element method (BEM) to anti-plane electroelastic problems are presented in this paper. Both direct and indirect methods with domain decomposition are discussed in details. Each crack is treated as semi-infinite thin slit defined in a subregion, for which a particular solution of the anti-plane problem, satisfying exactly the crack-face condition, is derived. The stress intensity factors defined at each crack tip can be directly computed from the coefficients of the particular solution. The performance of the proposed formulation is assessed by two examples and comparison is made with results obtained by other approaches. The Trefftz boundary element approach is demonstrated to be suitable for the analysis of the anti-plane problem of piezoelectric materials.