A thermodynamically consistent phenomenological model for ferroelectric and ferroelastic hysteresis

Abstract: We propose a hysteretic model for electromechanical coupling in piezoelectric materials, with the strain and the electric field as inputs and the stress and the polarization as outputs. This constitutive law satisfies the thermodynamic principles and exhibits good agreement with experimental measurements. Moreover, when it is coupled with the mechanical and electromagnetic balance equations, the resulting PDE system is well-posed under the hypothesis that hysteretic effects take place only in one preferred direction. We prove the existence and uniqueness of its global weak solutions for each initial data with prescribed regularity. One of the tools is a new Lipschitz continuity theorem for the inverse Preisach operator with time dependent coefficients.