Modeling and experimental characterization on fatigue behaviour of 1-3 piezocomposites

1-3 piezocomposites are very attractive materials in underwater and biomedical applications. These materials may be subjected to high electric field (2kV/mm) under continuous operation leading to deterioration in the output parameters such as remnant, saturation polarization and strain. Hence in this work, an experimental study is carried out to understand the fatigue behavior of 1-3 piezocomposites for various fiber volume fraction subjected to cyclic electric field (2kV/mm, 50Hz) up to 106 cycles. A uni-Axial micro-mechanical model is developed to predict the fatigue behaviour of 1-3 piezocomposite. The novelty of this model is, the remnant polarization and strain are chosen as internal variables which is also dependent on the damage.The simulated results are compared with the experimental observations, it is observed that the proposed micro-mechanical model is able to predict the material degradation with increase in number of cycles of operation. A parametric study is also conducted for various fiber volume fraction of 1-3 piezocomposite as function of fatigue cycle it shows that the amplitude of dielectric hysteresis and butterfly loop decreases with increase in the number of cycles. The fatigue behavior has a substantial effect in the performance parameters such as coercive field, remnant polarization and the asymmetric strain behavior of 1-3 piezocomposite. This fatigue study explores the utilities of 1-3 piezocomposites in transducer applications by providing insight into the device design.