A General Procedure for Modeling Physicochemical Coupling Behaviour of Advanced Materials ‐ Part I: Theory

Abstract

The advanced synthetic and natural materials, such as piezoelectric ceramics, electroactive polymers and biological soft tissues, exhibit the multi‐physical or physicochemical coupling behaviors. The coupling behavior involves the thermal‐mechanical, electric‐mechanical and electrochemicalmechanical interactions. The coupling phenomena can be modeled in the microscopic and macroscopic levels. In the microscale, the material consists of the solid, fluid and ions. The domain FE technique can be used to model the deformation of the solid and the flow of the fluid. In the macroscale, the mixture theory can be applied to description of the coupled response of the continuum under coupled thermal, electrical, chemical and mechanical loadings. A weak form of the governing equations is established by means of variational principle and a multi‐field finite element (MFE) method is developed for numerical modeling of the coupling behavior of advanced materials.

Citation

Yang, Q., Cui, C. and Lu, X. (2005), "A General Procedure for Modeling Physicochemical Coupling Behaviour of Advanced Materials ‐ Part I: Theory", Multidiscipline Modeling in Materials and Structures, Vol. 1 No. 3, pp. 223-230. https://doi.org/10.1163/157361105774538584