Contributed by the Applied Mechanics Division of THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERS for publication in the ASME JOURNAL OF APPLIED MECHANICS. Manuscript received by the ASME Applied Mechanics Division, May 17, 2001; final revision, Oct. 19, 2001. Associate Editor: A. K. Mal. Discussion on the paper should be addressed to the Editor, Prof. Lewis T. Wheeler, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-4792, and will be accepted until four months after final publication of the paper itself in the ASME JOURNAL OF APPLIED MECHANICS.
In the theoretical studies of crack problems, several different electric boundary conditions at the crack surfaces in piezoelectric materials have been proposed by numerous researchers (1,2,3,4). However, these solutions contain stress and electric displacement singularity. This is not reasonable according to the physical nature. To overcome the stress singularity in the classical...
