Studies on grain-boundary effects of ferroelectric polycrystals

The aim of this paper is to study the nonlinear dissipative effects of ferroelectric polycrystals based on firm thermodynamics principles. The developed micro-mechanically motivated model is embedded into an electromechanically coupled finite element formulation. In this framework, each domain is represented by a single finite element, and initial dipole directions are randomly oriented so that the virgin state of the particular bulk ceramics of interest reflects an un-poled material. Thermodynamically consistent energy criterion based on Gibbs free energy is adopted for the initiation of domain switching processes. The so-called grain-boundary effects, that is the constraint imposed by the surrounding grains on a grain at its boundary is incorporated in this model by means of micro-macromechanically motivated concept. In the expression for the driving force, an additional term is incorporated based on the change in Gibbs free energy of the neighboring grains for the particular switching domain/grain of interest. To study the overall bulk ceramics behavior, straightforward volume averaging techniques are applied. The simulated numerical results show appreciable improvement in modeling the nonlinear response for ferroelectrics subjected to various loading aspects compared with the experimental data from the literature.