Interfacial coplanar cracks in piezoelectric bi-material systems under pure mechanical impact loading

In this paper, we examine the dynamic behaviour of different piezoelectric bi-material combinations containing two interfacial cracks subjected to mechanical impact loading. The problem is formulated in terms of integral transforms techniques and the collocation method to obtain the solution for the resulting singular integral equation in the transformed plane. Laplace inversion was then used to obtain the resulting dynamic stress intensity factors in the physical plane. Numerical examples are provided for five different types of piezoelectric bi-material systems to illustrate the effect of the presence of collinear interacting cracks and the different material combinations upon the resulting dynamic stress intensity factors.