A cracked piezoelectric material strip under transient thermal loading

Considered in this paper is a piezoelectric material strip containing an embedded crack or an edge crack perpendicular to its boundaries. The problem is solved for a strip that is suddenly heated or cooled from the top surface. The bottom surface is assumed to be zero temperature or thermally insulated. First the transient temperature and the stress distributions in an uncracked strip are calculated. Then, these stresses are used as the crack surface traction with opposite sign to formulate the mixed boundary value problem. This leads to a singular integral equation of Cauchy-type, which is then solved numerically The numerically results for stress intensity factor are computed as a function of the normalized time and the crack size. The temperature and the thermal stress distributions for the uncracked problem are also included.