A theoretical study of branched cracks in piezoelectrics

The plane problem of a brittle piezoceramic with an arbitrarily oriented branched crack is theoretically investigated in this study. Lekhnitskii’s complex potentials and a distributed dislocation model are employed to formulate the problem. The crack closure is taken into consideration. The branched crack problem is reduced to solving three singular integral equations. The accuracy of the present scheme is confirmed by comparison with the...