ECCOMAS 2024

Finite element solution of flexoelectricity and flexo-photovoltaics at finite deformations

  • Pérez-Escudero, Sergi (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
  • Arias, Irene (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)
  • Fernàndez-Méndez, Sonia (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya)

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In the last decades, many researchers have focused on improving the efficiency of existing photovoltaic techniques. In that direction, the study of the flexoelectric phenomena has opened the path to another line of research referred to as flexo-photovoltaics. There is, however, very scarce work done in its computational modeling and solution. In this work, a simple yet revealing model consisting on coupling the flexoelectricity and the semiconductor modeling equations is considered together with its Finite Element (FE) solution. The photovoltaic part of the model is discretized by means of standard C0-FE approximations. However, flexoelectricity is modeled by 4th order PDE and, consequently, standard finite element formulations cannot be used. In infinitesimal deformations, its solution is carried out by means of a C0-Interior Penalty Method. The extension of the C0-IPM formulation for the finite deformations (non linear) framework is presented here. The coupling of photovoltaic and flexoelectric effects at finite deformations is currently under development.