Size effect in piezoelectric semiconductor nanostructures

A gradient theory is applied to the mechanical constitutive equations for piezoelectric semiconductor nanostructures. This is achieved by considering the strain gradients in the constitutive equation with high-order stresses and electric displacements in advanced continuum model. The C1 continuous interpolations of displacements or a mixed formulation is required in the finite element method (FEM) due to the presence of the second-order derivative on the elastic displacements. A mixed FEM is then developed from the principle of virtual work. Numerical examples clearly show the significant effect of flexoelectricity on the induced electric potential and electric current in the piezoelectric semiconductor nanostructures.

A Smoothing Scheme for Seismic Wave Propagation Simulation with a Mixed FEM of Diffusionized Wave Equation

In this paper, we propose a smoothing scheme for seismic wave propagation simulation. The proposed scheme is based on a diffusionized wave equation with the fourth-order spatial derivative term. So, the solution requires higher regularity in the usual weak formulation. Reducing the diffusionized wave equation to a coupled system of diffusion equations yields a mixed FEM to ease the regularity. We mathematically explain how our scheme works for smoothing. We construct a semi-implicit time integration scheme and apply it to the wave equation. This numerical experiment reveals that our scheme is effective for filtering short wavelength components in seismic wave propagation simulation.

Locking-Proof Tetrahedra

The simulation of incompressible materials suffers from locking when using the standard finite element method (FEM) and coarse linear tetrahedral meshes. Locking increases as the Poisson ratio gets close to 0.5 and often lower Poisson ratio values are used to reduce locking, affecting volume preservation. We propose a novel mixed FEM approach to simulating incompressible solids that alleviates the locking problem for tetrahedra. Our method uses linear shape functions for both displacements and pressure, and adds one scalar per node. It can accommodate nonlinear isotropic materials described by a Young’s modulus and any Poisson ratio value by enforcing a volumetric constitutive law. The most realistic such material is Neo-Hookean, and we focus on adapting it to our method. For , we can obtain full volume preservation up to any desired numerical accuracy. We show that standard Neo-Hookean simulations using tetrahedra are often locking, which, in turn, affects accuracy. We show that our method gives better results and that our Newton solver is more robust. As an alternative, we propose a dual ascent solver that is simple and has a good convergence rate. We validate these results using numerical experiments and quantitative analysis.