Abstract
•Mathematical modeling of effective properties of fully coupled thermo-electro-mechanical heterogeneous materials.•General mathematical formulation using the thermal strain effect and elliptic integrals.•Elaboration of thermo-electro-elastic Green’s functions and integral equations formulations.•Well conditioned localization tensors based on block decompositions for stable and accurate modeling.•Computation of effective anisotropic thermal conductivity and thermo-electro-elastic coefficients.
In the present paper, a mathematical modeling of effective properties of fully coupled thermo-electro-mechanical heterogeneous materials is elaborated. Constitutive equations combined with equilibrium equations lead to a coupled partial differential system. A methodological procedure is elaborated based on thermo-electro-elastic Green’s functions, integral equations, and a micro-macro approach. Localization tensors are derived using the Mori–Tanaka mean-field assumptions and the fully coupled effective behavior is obtained through averaging techniques. Due to the large dispersion between elastic, dielectric, and piezoelectric coefficients ill-conditioned localization tensors are resulted. Block matrix decomposition is elaborated to overcome this drawback and the so-regularized localization tensor’s inverses are used to get a well conditioned problem. Numerical computations are done in the general case of ellipsoidal inclusions and anisotropic behavior. Effective thermal conductivity and heat capacity coefficients are obtained with and without the heat strain effect for various volume fractions and types of inclusions. The global properties of thermo-electro-elastic reinforced composites are presented with respect to shape and volume fractions of inclusions.