Some numerical experiments about cracked piezoelectric media

Piezoelectric materials are increasingly used in actuators and sensors.
New applications can be found as constituents of smart composites for adaptive electromechanical structures. Under in service loading, phenomena of crack initiation and propagation may occur due to high electromechanical field concentrations. In the past few years, the extended finite element method (X-FEM) has been applied mostly to model cracks in structural materials. We present convergence results in the energy norm and for the stress intensity factors Then, some results obout inaccuracies in the stresses near the crack tip are presented.