Interacting multiple cracks in piezoelectric materials

In this paper, a method is presented to calculate the plane electro-elastic fields in piezoelectric materials with multiple cracks. The cracks may be distributed randomly in locations, orientations and sizes. In the method, e ach crack is treated as a continuous distributed dislocations with the dens ity function to be determined according to the conditions of external loads and crack surfaces. Some numerical examples are given to show the interact ing effect among multiple cracks. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.